From Clueless to Confident: The Impact of Deliberate Writing Practice

Want to take your writing from ‘meh’ to magnificent? The secret isn’t just writing more—it’s writing smarter with deliberate practice. A targeted, goal-driven approach that helped me improve and might

Deliberate practice can help you on your journey to become a better writer

I used to think that writing more automatically made me a better writer. “Just keep going,” they said. So I did—churning out pages upon pages, convinced that sheer word count would magically improve my craft. Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Instead, I found myself stuck in the same cycle—abandoning drafts that felt off, struggling with the same weaknesses, and worst of all, having no idea how to actually get better.

In this article, I’ll take you through my journey—how I figured out what I needed to work on, the struggles I faced, and how I eventually developed my own practice routine to level up my storytelling skills. I’ll even throw in some tools I created to help you get started.

From Writing in the Dark to Writing with Purpose

For the longest time, I thought I was doing everything right. I’d write short stories, start novels, even participate in writing challenges. But deep down, I knew something was missing.

Eventually I plucked up the courage to submit a couple of chapters for scrutiny by a book coach. They offered to do a deep dive for free on one condition. I let them record the session as content for their podcast.

At this point I figured, what the heck, what had I got to lose, pressing send before I could change my mind¹.

Not surprisingly there was a a lot of feedback, thankfully some good, more not so. Lesser mortals might be put off by this but not me. I was committed now. Having taken the plunge I realised that like most aspiring authors who sit down and decide they want to write - I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

Now that I knew that, I wanted to know what I didn’t know. So I could learn what I needed to know to be a better storyteller (and not write sentences like that).

I won’t go into all the feedback I received (the therapy bill would be too high), but it largely boiled down into three main sections.

1. My pacing was all over the place.

2. My characters sounded eerily similar—like different versions of me.

3. My dialogue lacked that spark that makes it feel natural.

The worst part? At the time I didn’t know how to fix any of it. The feedback highlighted the specific instances within the chapters I submitted but what about the rest of the book? Even if I could spot the problems, improving them would feel like trying to fix a car with no mechanical knowledge.

This was when I started researching ways to actively improve instead of just writing more for the sake of it.

The first step was to sign up with the book coach. Yes, I’m not going to lie, it was expensive and I appreciate it might not be available to everyone but after consultation I felt it was worth the effort. Spoiler — it was. However don’t worry there are ways you can ‘go it alone’ if you have to.

I think the biggest impact the coach had was to introduce me to the concept of deliberate practice, and it was a real light bulb moment. Instead of writing blindly, hoping for improvement, with my coaches support, I started approaching writing with intention. We focused on my weak spots, analysed my work critically, and created a structured practice routine that helped me turn aimless effort into actual progress.

As much as I’d like to I couldn’t rely (or afford to rely) on my coach forever, sooner or later I had to stand on my own two feet.

Learning to Be My Own Critic (Without the Self-Doubt Spiral)

The first challenge? Figuring out what I needed to focus on. Writing had felt like this massive, overwhelming beast. With my coaches support and advice I realised that breaking things down into smaller, more manageable areas was key.

Here’s how we assessed my writing:

• Plot & Structure: Did my stories have a clear beginning, middle, and end? Were the stakes high enough?

• Characters & Dialogue: Did they sound unique, or like carbon copies of each other?

• Pacing & Flow: Did my writing keep readers engaged, or did it drag?

• Description & Setting: Was I painting vivid pictures, or drowning in purple prose?

We started by rating my work in each of these areas (ouch, that was humbling), and once I had a clearer picture of my weaknesses, I could finally focus on improving them.

So you might be wondering exactly how this rating process works (especially if you’d like to copy it for yourself), to answer that I have one word - Rubrics.

A rubric is a scoring guide that lists the criteria for evaluating a piece of work in a specific category or through a specific lens. By applying a consistent criteria each piece of work can be considered on it’s own merit but also ranked against other similar pieces.

Rubrics are nothing new and have been used in education in one form or another since day one. Here’s a free notion template which you can duplicate or use as the basis for creating your own rubric (https://techdojo.notion.site/Three-Story-Method-Editing-Rubrics-9cbd52378d834949924d972493188790).

This rubric was based on the work created by J. Thorn as part of his Three Story Method book (an excellent resource for learning about the core structure of story and one I’ll be reviewing in a future issue - book links here (Amazon UK) and here (Amazon US)).

Building My Own Deliberate Practice Routine

Once I had a handle on what needed work, the next challenge was figuring out how to actually practice without getting overwhelmed. I realised that, just like athletes train specific muscles, I needed to break writing down into smaller exercises that focused on specific elements.

Here’s the deliberate practice routine I eventually developed:

1. Micro-Writing Drills:

   1. Practicing snippets of dialogue between different characters to give each a unique voice.

   2. Rewriting scenes with a focus on pacing—cutting unnecessary fluff and tightening the action.

   3. Using writing prompts to allow me to focus on specific elements

2. Reverse-Engineering Great Writing:

   1. Studying my favourite books to see how the pros handle dialogue, description, and pacing.

   2. Breaking down their work scene by scene and asking, “Why does this work?”

3. Feedback and Iteration:

   1. Getting feedback from trusted critique partners and actually applying it, instead of just nodding and moving on.

   2. Keeping track of recurring feedback patterns to spot my biggest weaknesses.

   3. Using specific prompts to perform writing katas.²

4. Tracking Progress:

   1. I started using Notion to log my writing goals, practice exercises, and feedback in one place.

   2. Having a clear record of what I was working on helped me stay motivated and accountable.

The Struggle of Staying Consistent

Let’s be real—this wasn’t all smooth sailing. Some days, I felt like I was improving by leaps and bounds, and other days, it felt like I was stuck in quicksand. The temptation to revert back to mindless writing was always there.

Here’s what helped me stay consistent:

• Small Wins: Celebrating little victories, like writing a piece of dialogue that actually felt alive.

• Accountability: Checking in with fellow writers and sharing progress, even when I wanted to throw my laptop out the window.

• Reminders of Progress: Going back to old work and seeing how far I’d come—yes, the cringe was real, but so was the growth.

How Notion Became My Writing HQ

Like most writers I was a Scrivener devotee. I had the app on both my laptop and my phone and the syncing between the two using dropbox worked well (mostly). But the one area when Scrivener seems to fall down is with collaboration with other authors / editors.

For real time collaboration with my book coach Scrivener just wasn’t going to cut it.

On the first call I had we tried using Google Docs, which was perfect for collaboration but again fell down when it came to structuring a large document and navigating around became a pain. Plus it meant having to copy / paste sections of my Scrivener document to and from and keeping everything in sync quickly became a pain.

Prior to this I’d started to use Notion as a personal note taking app and the one feature that stood out was the ability for real time collaboration so ahead of my next coaching session I whipped up a simple database and copied over the scenes we were looking at. The editing experience was pretty good and certainly on par with Scrivener so it was a fairly seamless transition and within no time I was ready to rock³.

Inviting my coach as a collaborator was simple enough and being web based there was no extra software to install.

The collaborative editing features meant that after the session had ended I could complete the tasks given and get feedback and comments without any extra steps. What really was mind blowing was that by adding one quick status property to my scene database Notion could display the entire thing as a kanban board and we could literally drag and drop scenes around the board to show what scenes had been edited, which were ready for feedback, which were done. It was a game changer.

Diving deep down the Notion rabbit hole I discovered so many different ways I could improve my writing process. Notion was there to support me in every step of the journey from ideation through to publication and beyond.

As I experimented I setup system after system to help me stay focused and track my improvements over time.

For instance, here’s just a few of the ways I used Notion to make deliberate practice easier:

• A Practice Log: Where I tracked what I worked on each day and what I learned.

• A Feedback Tracker: To record critiques from different sources and spot patterns.

• A Story Bank: A collection of my favourite writing snippets and techniques I wanted to try.

• Goal-Setting Pages: To break down long-term goals into actionable, bite-sized steps.

Notion basically became my writing life support system, and today I’d struggle without it.

What I’ve Learned (So Far!)

Looking back, I wish I had discovered deliberate practice sooner. But the most important thing I’ve learned is that writing improvement isn’t magic—it’s about showing up with intention.

If you’re feeling stuck in your writing journey, here’s what I’d recommend:

1. Be honest about your weaknesses—not as self-criticism, but as a roadmap for growth.

2. Create small, focused practice sessions—you don’t have to fix everything at once.

3. Track your progress—it helps more than you think.

4. Seek feedback and use it wisely—critique is fuel for growth, not a personal attack.

Most importantly, have fun with it. Writing is a journey, and deliberate practice doesn’t mean sucking the joy out of it—it means learning how to enjoy it even more as you improve.

In Summary

If you’re feeling like your writing is stuck on repeat, I get it—I’ve been there. But trust me when I say that deliberate practice can make a world of difference. With the right approach, a bit of structure, and a healthy dose of patience, you’ll start to see meaningful improvement in your writing.

So why not start today? Pick one aspect of your writing to focus on and dive in—your future, more confident writer self will thank you.

What do you think? Ready to try some deliberate practice in your own writing? Let me know in the comments, and look out for more posts on how to use Notion to empower your own journey to master storytelling.

1. If you ever get the opportunity to do this, grab it with both hands, your future self will thank you for it.

2. This is actually a topic that warrants digging into a lot more - think of it as training for your black-belt in deliberate practice. I’m happy to expand on this if anyone is interested. Let me know in the comments.

3. Ironically my previous workflow had involved drafting on my phone and editing on the laptop - and before anyone starts screaming about how you can’t write a book on a phone I have a 90,000 draft that was 95% completed on an iPhone 7+ and in peak flow I can get down 1000 words in about an hour. So having both the Notion mobile and desktop apps provided a 1:1 replacement for Scrivener (and Notion is free!)