Just finished a new book by Daniel Coyle called The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How (Bantam, 2009), and I’d recommend it for anyone trying to organize a writing group or workshop, or develop their own talent.

Coyle begins by taking apart the myth of the solitary, original genius and describes how different people in different fields (but especially sports and the arts) have created and thrived in what he calls “talent hotbeds” — places where clusters of amazingly talented people have arisen and gone on to dominate their respective fields.

On the writing front, he uses the Bronte sisters as an example, describing the fantastical worlds they co-created and wrote about as children and how that early writing experience helped shape them into accomplished novelists.

Writers actually get the least amount of ink in the book, but the other examples (soccer stars coming from the favelas of Brazil, international tennis champions from the same tiny Russian training club) provide a fairly clear blueprint for creating your own talent hotbed. Some key elements include:

• An environment rich in cues that tell participants, Better get busy, such as aspirational models and peers who are all working hard toward a single goal
• A skilled coach who can offer structure and clear feedback highly tailored to each individual
• A sense of scarcity and luck to be there in the first place (a limited number of participants, for instance, requiring a lottery or an audition to get in)
• An “ignition” source that shows participants that they can do this (a champion who came from the same program/group/club works nicely in many cases, but there are other ways to spark motivation)

Writing is an often solitary activity, but if you aren’t up for forming your own workshop or collective, there are still thing you can do to build your own talent. Some major takeaways from the book include:

• “deep practice” — practice that involves breaking things down to their smallest possible components and working on those until they are near effortless, then putting it all back together — which builds myelin on your neural circuits and increases the speed at which they can fire (up to 3,000 times faster)
• creating your own better get busy cues. For writers, that means reading, and setting up your own environment to prompt you to write. (Coyle says that spartan is better here — if your surroundings are too luxurious, that may decrease the better get busy
  vibe you are trying to create.)
• keeping at it — Coyle quotes the 10,000 hours of practice = mastery guideline, and shows the neuroscience that backs it up. It has to be the right kind of practice, though.

There are lots of other tidbits about learning and coaching, too many to list here. Interesting and worth reading.