Write Better *and* Faster? (Patreon)

I just finished a class called "Write Better-Faster 101" from the Better-Faster Academy by Becca Syme. A writer friend of mine took the class last fall and it sounded interesting.
Since I haven't gone to conventions, I've had fewer chances for professional development as an author over the last couple of years, so I decided to give the class a shot. I'm very glad that I did.

Becca has made a name for herself in the writing world with her "Dear Writer, You Need to Quit" non-fiction books, the QuitCast video podcast, and the Better-Faster Academy. The BFA adapts the CliftonStrengths system from Gallup to writers (Gallup uses it mostly for business/management stuff) as well as other psychometrics like the ODAT (a version of the DISC assessment) and a free version of the MBTI. The idea is that identifying your strengths makes it easier to focus your development as a writer and that you'll get "Better-Faster" by developing those strengths rather than trying to shore up your weaknesses.

All of these tests are fallible, so I tried to go into the class looking for ideas for options to try out more than a proscriptive view of the universe.. Not "Because you're ENFP, you have to X", but "If you're ENFP, and you find that XYZ is hard, you might try <so and so>. 

What I found is that the Strengths system seems to mostly serve as a language for describing how different people's perspectives, inclinations, and aptitudes might combine, how those strengths can be adaptive or maladaptive, and then applying all of that to writing.

According to this system and the test results, my top 5 strengths are:

1) Strategic
2) Communication
3) Input
4) Woo
5) Ideation

Strategic is described as being able to rapidly identify patterns and come up with a strong option for how to proceed.

Communication is about being able to easily translate your thoughts into words - getting across what you mean. It's explicitly a social strength.

Input is an inclination toward and aptitude in seeking out and absorbing information.

Woo (or "winning others over") is about enjoying meeting new people and making a good first impression/initial connection.

Ideation is very much a brainstorming strength but also about distilling things down into an understandable form/framing.

Strategic, Input, and Ideation are "Strategic Thinking" strengths, Communication and Woo are "Influencing" strengths. There are also "Relationship Building" strengths and "Executing" strengths. There are 34 total strengths, and having a strength ranked low doesn't necessarily mean you're *bad* at the strength. Therefore, this system would say that I'm strongest in Strategic Thinking, which definitely lines up with how I see my aptitude and inclinations.

The way the class talked about strengths reminded me of two things:

1) Skills in the video game Disco Elysium, where each skill is a voice in your head, representing a distinct set of knowledge, capacity, or sensitivity. "Your limbic system says X, your Command says Y". It's a really interesting system, and I recommend folks check out the game for that alone (there's also other cool stuff about the game) - maybe watch a let's play if you're not sure it's for you, and then you can at least get a sense of how the skill system works.

2) The Roman idea of the genius as a distinct voice that accompanies a person rather than a quality inherent to a person. You "have" a genius rather than you "are" a genius. (There's obviously more to it, I'm using a fairly reductive version here). 

The commonality is the idea that you can think about strengths as interconnected by distinguishable ways of seeing the world or ways of being as a person. And strengths combine in interesting ways. Strategic + Ideation combine where a person might be inclined to brainstorm and iterate through a bunch of ideas and possibilities quickly. Then someone who lacks those strengths might have a hard time understanding how you got from A to J. The idea here is that people with vastly different strengths see the world very differently and their minds work very differently.

Or, to put it another way, strengths are used as a way of describing *how* people see the world differently and how their minds work differently. They can serve as a descriptive system to reflect those differences.


What about the Better-Faster part?

A central premise of the class is that self-knowledge can help you improve more quickly, both by identifying what kinds of advice aren't a fit for you and giving a bit of a framework through which to interpret ideas. As an ENFP, the class suggests that if I've had trouble trying to do firm outlines or write as a plotter, that might be because of X and Y.

The class also talks about how personality inclination/strengths may inform how you develop ideas, how you can focus and draft quickly, how you can revise most efficiently, and so on. It talks about how some personality inclinations may mean that a writer is going to be happier pursuing trad publishing because they value working with a team of experts as part of a team or because they want the validation of publishing through an established imprint, or why your inclinations might mean you're happier writing in several genres where you can continue pursuing novelty.

There was a bunch of material in the class, and I'm still thinking things over, revisiting the lectures, and working my way through videos made by the academy and Becca's QuitCast. None of what I've seen in the class is a big revelation for me, as I've been working as a professional writer for a decade+ now and have tried a bunch of different process approaches as well as spent time thinking about how my brain works and how my inclinations apply in my writing. But it was still very useful in giving me a new framework through which to think about how individual writers' personalities and inclinations manifest in how and why they write. 

As my friend said, this class may be more revelatory or revolutionary for a writer earlier in their career or someone who has hit some hard blocks in their career and are looking for some ideas about how to understand why these challenges are happening and how you might address them. The 101 class comes with one coaching session with an academy coach, all of whom are certified by the Gallup company for coaching with the Strengths system. 

My coaching session mostly served to validate and reinforce thoughts I already had about what obstacles I'm facing right now (I'm a people person in a pandemic in an area that's consistently pretty hard-hit and don't get to spend time in-person with people as much as is best for me + the novel I'm working on focuses more on skills I haven't developed as much in writing but that reflect my inclination toward social justice and utopian futurism).

If you've taken the CliftonStrengths test for work or if you've already taken one of the Better-Faster Academy classes, I'd be very interested in hearing what you thought of the Strengths system and/or the class. Again, because part of how I work through my thoughts about things is by talking with people.