Simple as 1-2-3

How to Think About Writing Well

By Charles Euchner Creator, The Writing Code Sometimes it takes a simple game and a modest man to explain what really matters. And what matters for developing talent in sports, musical instruments, acting, scientific research, business, and of course writing is breaking down skills into the simplest pieces. Its as easy as 1-2-3. Those thoughts came to mind with the 2012 championship game of the Little League World Series. The kids from Tokyo, Japan, beat the kids from Goodlettsville, Tennessee, 12-2, to win the championship. Japans Noriatsu Osaka hit three home runs and a triple to lead the way. The Little League World Series is a strange phenomenon. ESPN and ABC cover all of the games involving 13-year-olds. Kids just entering adolescence become famous, if only for a few weeks. The games are fun, the kids usually have a great time, and the series offers a 21st-century version of a Norman Rockwell painting. The dark side, of course, is that the adults often care too much, cutting and sniping against each other, arguing with umpires, banning the kids from the pool (They could slip!), and letting their best pitchers throw till they fracture still-developing bones. So its sweet, but also a little sick. Back in 2005 I went to the LLWS to write a book on the changing world of youth sports in America. That years winners came from Ewa Beach, a working-class community in Hawaii. Once a sugar plantation town, Ewa Beach was now a sprawling town of construction men, hospitality workers, government workers, and truck drivers. Lots of truck drivers. In fact, a half-dozen fathers on the Ewa Beach drove trucks for a living. Only one father had an education beyond high school. How that Ewa Beach team won confirmed some of the worst stereotypes about todays too-serious world of youth sports. But it also revealed something sweet about the power of play. First, the worst: The team was assembled for the expressed purpose of winning the LLWS. Nothing else mattered. rather than just cobble together teams for the sheer fun of play, a truck driver for the U.S. Postal Service named Layton Aliviado set out to build a team of superstars. Aliviado and his payers actually broke away from a Pony League to create a new Little League organization to go for the glory of the Little League World Series. The kids played and practiced all year. They held grueling practices in the unforgiving Hawaii sun. At the Little League World Series, you could tell these Hawaii kids were serious. But they were also much more so than the tournaments other top teams from Japan, Curacao, California, and Florida playful. While the coaches from california

and Florida bitterly accused each other of all kinds of crimes, the Hawaiians and their families were pure joy. In the stands, the Hawaii families were all smiles, all the time. They all knew each other like families. They had, in fact, lived and grown together for years. Many of the parents saw the Little League World Series as a chance to get their kids high school scholarships that would in turn lead to college opportunities. Many aimed for the exclusive Punahou School (where Barack Obama graduated) or the Saint Louis School. A few dreamed about playing Division 1 baseball or football. But most just wanted a chance at something many middle-class kids take for granted a college-preparatory school. Thats why at least half of the parents cared so much about these games. After the LLWS, I went to Hawaii to see how this team got built. I went to football games and cookouts and visited families at their homes. I spent hours with Layton Aliviado. He explained how the team got so strong and so skilled. The kids from Ewa Beach drilled intensely in the months leading to the Series. They moved form station to station, working on vertical leaps, running through ladders, sprinting, fielding grounders, catching line drives, lunging, duck-walking, and doing long jumps. They moved fast, from post to post . . . and then started over again. So the team was strong. Just as important, the team was skilled. Aliviado taught the kids pitching, hitting, throwing, and running, with a simple 1-2-3 breakdown of the skills. As we talked in his living room, Aliviado jumped up to demonstrate how he taught hitting: set, shift, hit. He grabbed a bat, got in a hitting position, and narrated his movements. One: stride forward. Two: get the hips going, get the hands going. Three: bring the hands around into the zone, snap everything forward. The key, he said, was to put everything in threes. In the beginning of the season I do 1-2-3 drills, he said. I keep it simple for the kids. Everyone can count. Just count out what to do and explain by showing. Then they have it stuck in their heads: 1-2-3. I do the same thing with throwing and pitching. Every kid can count, right? Thats the essence of good teaching. Break down actions into their smallest parts, and focus on each action intently. As Dan Coyle explains in his terrific book The Talent Code, this kind of intense focus rewires the brain. Too often, teachers and coaches fail to break skills down into their smallest pieces. They offer broad commands and tell the student to just do it. Hit the ball hard. Reach that high note. Record the data in your science experiment. Memorize the vocabulary words. To learn well, teachers need to break these broad skills into pieces. And thats what I have down with The Writing Code. Too often, teachers and editors fail to explain how to do what they demand . They say: Keep it simple! And: Cut Clutter! And: Use details! And: Show, dont tell! And: Tell a story! But they dont say how. Often, they avoid breaking down skills because they dont know how themselves. Stanley Fish, while dean at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was horrified to

discover how badly his graduate students wrote. And then he realized that these same grad students taught most of the schools writing courses. And so he investigated. To his horror, he discovered that only four out of 104 composition classes actually taught techniques of writing. Lets reflect on that for a moment. Only four out of 104 writing classes taught writing. We can do better. While teaching writing at Yale, I decided to analyze everything I could read old and new, good and bad, fiction and nonfiction, serious and playful, scholarly and academic to identify all the skills you need to write well. When I identified about 100 of those skills, I broke them down into their simplest actions. Then I found great authors from antiquity to modern times Homer, William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, to name just a small sample whose works demonstrated those skills. I used passages from those authors to model those skills. In addition to breaking these skills into their smallest pieces, I devised a number of simple formats and processes like The Landscape View and Search and Destroy, to name two to help you apply those skills right away. The result is a whole series of books describing everything you need to know to write well. I hope youll sample one or two. However accomplished your writing whether youre a student or an accomplished writer youll find tricks that help you improve your writing sometimes dramatically. Try one out and tell me how well it works. One last thing. Just about every skill of The Writing Code System can be broken down into three parts. Coach Layton Aliviado, I think, would be proud. Charles Euchner is the creator of The Writing Code (www.thewritingcodesystem.com), the only brain-based system for mastering writing in all fields. Euchner is the author of a dozen books on writing, civil rights, politics, public policy, and baseball. Euchner, who has taught writing at Yale and directed the Rappaport Institute at Harvard, lives in New York City. This piece originally appeared in the blog of The Writing Code.