Study and Experience

The Two Ways to Learn Anything

Ah, study and experience. Study and experience: They go together like, uh, foolishness and impercipience. That’s it, that’s all I have. The rest of the article will contain no humor. I have used it all up on that. Today I did not have much to begin with.

Last time I was here with the one and only one skill you need to learn every new thing under the sun and now I am back and it’s a new week and I have two more things for you to do to learn stuff and that probably seems annoying. Now we’re up to three things. That’s way too many things. I can barely count to three.

It’s true, though: If you cultivate the skill of learning new things, you can then use that to learn any new thing. And the way you learn any new thing is through study (of the thing) and experience (doing the thing). There’s actually a third way but I’ll get to that at the end so it’ll be a little reward for those who stick with me all the way through.

When I say study, I don’t only mean sitting at your desk with your head down over a textbook late at night preparing to take a test the next day. That’s one sense of the word study, to be a student and learn about something from a book or other authority on the matter (like a teacher). I also mean study in the sense of a scientist or researcher conducting a study, like when a doctor studies patients in a clinical trial to learn a new way of treating their illness or a psychologist studies a group of people in an experiment.

When I say study, I mean learning through some form of observation, which could mean

• Reading a book about techniques for doing this thing

• Watching a video on the subject of this thing

• Watching a live person (or a vide of them) do the thing 

• Listening to someone explain how to do the thing 

• Reviewing data or analytics about the thing

• Examining examples of the thing created by experts or masters

When I say experience I mean learning through actually doing the thing, which simply means doing whatever it is, however bad you are at it, and then doing it more until you get better at it. 

I don’t think there’s anything at all that can’t be learned, and then mastered, those two ways. I suspect some people learn better by studying and others learn better by doing, but I think you must have some mix of the components to learn anything new to you. For instance, if someone had never knit before and I handed them a ball of yarn and two needles and said, “here, knit something”—I don’t think anyone could successfully knit so much as a square without some kind of instruction, some kind of guidance, about how to cast on stitches, how to do the knit stitch, and how to cast back off. 

On the other hand, I think you could show someone infinite videos on knitting, let them read infinite books on how to do it, let them examine an infinite number of sweaters for an infinite amount of time, and then expect them to be able to knit something on their first try. No matter how much that person studied ahead of actually trying the skill for themself, I don’t think they—least not most people—could retain all the knowledge needed to successfully knit something just from study; not until they had tried it themself.

Part of this is because until we sit down to do something for the first time, we don’t see where the gaps in our knowledge are. We don’t know what we don’t know, so we don’t know what questions we need to ask. With experience in doing something comes the ability to troubleshoot a problem or mistake. I find that a lot of my early attempts at practicing any new skill are fine as long as nothing goes off the rails—but as soon as something doesn’t go according to the perfect process, I need to rely on someone with that experience to diagnose what caused the problem and how to fix it.

I think about study and experience a lot when it comes to writing because even people who have never thought about becoming writers have some degree of study in the process—even people who don’t intend to write books read books. Many people, when they first settle on the idea of writing something, believe they are very well prepared for this endeavor because, after all, they’ve been able to read for most of their life. They’ve probably spent most of their life writing, too—writing letters and emails, some essays for school here, some instructions for the petsitter there.

Most of us sit down to write fiction or creative nonfiction or poetry or a screenplay already knowing the fundamentals of how to write, that is, how to form words into sentences in our head and then commit them to a written medium.

Now: I’m a person who loves food. This is plain to see if you look at me, I’m delightfully plump. (This is also down to a hatred of exercise, and moderation.) I have a tremendous amount of experience with food: I have been eating since the day I was born; I eat most every day. In fact, I’d venture to say that I have some fairly sophisticated opinions about food. I’m confident that I can see, taste, and smell food and be able to tell what that food’s merits are or aren’t; whether it’s cooked well, whether it’s flavorful, whether the presentation is beautiful. Sometimes—and don’t let this get around because I try to keep it secret—I even prepare my own food for myself and my partner to eat in our home.

But none of the above means I am prepared to open a restaurant tomorrow.

Why? Because my study and experience of consuming food is broad and deep and I know a lot about what’s good or not good, but my experience of preparing food is limited to feeding myself and one to three other people. I do not have any experience in nor even any study of the preparation of food for large quantities of people all eating different dishes all eating in various group sizes at staggered times. I have no idea how to do this. And that’s just the food preparation aspect of opening a restaurant. What about the business aspect of opening a restaurant? Hiring and training front- and back-of-house staff? Finding a suitable location and outfitting a kitchen? Securing food suppliers? Creating the menu? Advertising? Insurance? Payroll?

Even though I have eaten food my whole life, and sometimes prepared food for myself and others, I just don’t have the skills needed to open a restaurant. I would have to study the restaurant business and get firsthand experience in the restaurant business before I could expect to successfully open my own—or else I’d need the capital up front to hire people with those particular skills and experience to help me so my endeavor wouldn’t flail and go under.

Writing and publishing are like this, too. Most of us have been reading and writing our whole lives, but that doesn’t mean we can pivot from writing business emails to writing a novel; we’re not born with those skills. They have to be learned. And writing is only part of the skillset—it’s like the food preparation piece of it, the creative piece. There’s also the business piece—publishing.

The good news is, anyone who can already read and write is primed to learn and master these skills through study and experience. The other good news is, if you sat down to write a novel or a story or a screenplay and it didn’t come flowing right out of your pen on the first try—or if you self-published your work and didn’t find the success you thought you would—these things are not signs that you can’t succeed at writing and publishing. They are probably just signs that you need to rack up some hours of study and experience.

Writing is like any other art. It requires creativity (which, by the way, is not a you-have-it-or-don’t prospect but something you can develop) and it requires mastery of craft. You have to have ideas to write about and the creative ability to develop those, and also the skill to execute on the ideas.

Most of us can hold a paint brush (if you can hold a pen you can hold a paint brush) but we don’t expect to sit down—again most of us—on our first try and paint a great work of art, one that will sell for a significant sum of money, and the prints of which will continue to sell and provide us with income after that sale of the original. Most of us can tap out “Chopsticks” on a piano but probably don’t expect to sit down without years of study and practice and create an album of concertos and sell it to a major record label and retire on the income.

But that’s what many folks think when they first sit down to write a novel—I’ll write this story I’m thinking of, sell it to a publisher for a large advance, and then earn my living from the royalties that come along after the advance earns out. Nevermind that earning a living by making a business out of selling art is already a rare situation—how many people can you think of who make a living selling fine art as opposed to people who make a living as graphic designers? 

Even among those authors who are selling manuscripts to trad publishers or moving copies of their self-published titles, earning enough money to comfortably live on is rare. Remember, as I explained in Write to Life, replacing your day-job income with book-sales income means you need more money because you will need to cover things like self-employment taxes, retirement savings, and health insurance out of your own pocket without an employer to defray the cost.

The remedy remains: Study and experience. Study writing by reading widely, participating in peer critique, attending workshops and retreats, forming writing groups, and taking writing courses. Build your writing experience by writing and writing a lot (quantity creates quality, after all) , by revising and fine tuning and polishing your work till it shines. Learn as much as you can about publishing—although I don’t recommend a day job in publishing if your goal is to be a working fiction author, because that is not the route. Hone your craft. Don’t get discouraged and certainly don’t give up if your first effort wasn’t a Clair De Lune or a Whistler’s Mother. Those weren’t Debussy’s or Whistler’s first efforts, either.

James McNeil Whistler, however, was Whistler’s Mother’s first attempt. And then the second son was a Confederate soldier. So that goes to show that sometimes you do do your very best work on the first try. Every rule has an exception.

I promised a third way to learn something, besides study and experience. There is one more way, which is to teach whatever it is. If you are expert enough in a thing to teach it, the act of teaching it will in turn improve your skills even further. For that reason, I suggest taking any opportunity to share your expertise with your peers. It enriches you as much as it does them.

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