I love bagels. I discovered the bagel when I was about seven years old. It was not a fling, nor a passing trend, like many other bread products, but a life-long love. New York or Montreal style, you ask? I must admit, I love them all. For me, the ultimate comfort food is a toast bagel with plain cream cheese.
I decided that 2022 was the year that I would conquer making bagels. I had tried at various times in the past with meh results.
First step research: I watched the episode of the Great Canadian Baking when they made bagels, I watched u-tube videos, and I compared online recipes.
Then I started: I try to make about a dozen bagels every other week, sometimes more often. I take notes and do more research when a bagel doesn’t work out (why did it deflate in the boiling water?). I experiment (more boiling time, less boiling time, more malt powder or less?). I get creative (it turns out that my bagels rise perfectly in my smoker! And I get a “smoked” bagel!)… and of course, I get feedback from my guests who are willing to consume fresh baked bagels over the past many months. I never predicted that chilli-garlic sauce added to the dough would produce the most popular flavour.
My first attempt turned out rather flat, dense bagels. But now, eight months later, my bagels are getting closer and closer to perfection.
Malcolm Gladwell theorized that you need to do about 10,000 hours to get really good at any one thing. I don’t think I have put in 10,000 hours of bagel making yet. The good news: the concept of “deliberate practice” offers hope for a short cut. Deliberate practice is when you work purposeful and systematically towards a specific goal. In bagel making, this would be the difference between making 10,000 bagels repetitively and instead working at the mistakes, keeping track of what makes a bagel slightly better than the last batch, and continuously refining techniques based on feedback.
James Clear defines deliberate practice as: While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance. For more, see https://jamesclear.com/beginners-guide-deliberate-practice
You can apply the concept of deliberate practice to your writing. In the summer, I did my experiment where I found that I was both more creative and more productive, if I wrote every day. But to get the most out of my 15 minutes of writing, I decided I will now focus on deliberate practice.
How to do this with writing? When I was working on my experiment, I focused on writing anything. It didn’t matter what it was, as long as I was writing something. For sure, this is a good place to start to get into the habit of writing every day.
But now, I want to improve my writing. For deliberate practice, I need a specific goal to improve one aspect of writing. Shawn Coyle, in the Story Grid, states that the “scene” is the basic unit of story writing for novelists. He defines a scene as having five key elements (inciting incident, progressive and rising complications, crisis, climax and resolution) and can be around 1500 words, give or take a few hundred (see https://storygrid.com/scenes/ for more information). Getting good at writing a scene seemed like an excellent goal for writing. Like bagel making, this seems like a do-able goal as well.
To do this experiment, I decided to focus on writing 1 scene per week in my 15 to 30 minutes dedicated writing time I do every morning. I have picked 6 scenes that I want to write in my work in progress. I want to make these scenes the very best I can so I will work in one per week and after each week, I’ll review the scene for how well I wrote it, evaluating it for structure. I’ll do this while eating my almost, but not yet, perfect bagel and drinking my coffee of course!
Happy writing!
