When you said that you wrote 50k in what sounds like a marathon way, I wonder how come thinking didn't play a greater role. Was it to immerse in the action of writing fiction?
Ah! Yes. It was to forcibly get through the wall that kept fiction from coming out. And, that's what NaNoWriMo is about, too--50K words, one month, little or no editing. I see NaNoWriMo as an exercise in defeating writer's block by sheer brute force. I don't really need that any more, so I haven't participated in a while.
There's more than a grain of truth to what you said. I likened fiction to a second language in a conversation I had earlier today.
1/ But if you never actually play anybody else, just sit alone in your room? I know that top masters will spend hours analysing a position/opening alone in their room, but until they actually go out and play against a real opponent, they won't know what they don't know. Frank Marshall spent two years waiting to unleash his Marshall attack upon an unsuspecting Raoul Capablanca - two years of preparing by sitting alone in his room - and Capablanca found an answer to it over the board and beat him. 2/ I'm going back to the days before computers, or the internet, so that wasn't an option. And even playing a computer is no substitute for playing a human opponent of your own level; because unless you're at the VERY top level they'll all have different styles, different strengths and weaknesses; they'll all have something different that you can learn from. Even computers that have different "style" settings (different "strength" settings won't give the same variety in play) tend to have a "computer" style that you can learn from, and then come badly unstuck against a human who doesn't do what you'd expect a computer to play. And even Grandmasters have their own style. Mikhail Botvinnik, Mikhail Tal, Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer (consecutive World Champions) were all as different as chalk and cheese. Returning to the OP, it's only when you actually DO something - like writing a novel or a short story, or play a real opponent - that you can see whether you can do it, or whether you just think you can do it because you've done all the appropriate studying.
All well and good. I didn't say that, of course, but it is your prerogative to imply that's what I meant. As silly as it makes my post and by extension me look. But you were providing chess as an analogy, or a metaphor. Perhaps that guy didn't want to join your team because the smugness put him off? Who knows. People don't always come right out and tell you why they are doing something. But in the grand scheme of learning, some people prefer to do their own thing, rather than be forced into what Chess Club Captain says you should do. You provide one example, but it is only that - an example of a learning style. To refuse to acknowledge there are other learning styles that are more effective for other people seems somewhat myopic. And that was the only distinction I sought to communicate. People learn different ways. But you don't have to do it to learn it. You can learn to do it without actually doing it. Brain surgeons are one such example.
But it's only when he's got an actual brain open in front of him that you can see whether all that alone-in-a-room learning works. I suspect that they don't take a surgeon straight from the brain surgery classroom and say "Now you are a Brain Surgeon (Harry Potter!)" and then let him loose...I suspect that they let him loose as an apprentice under the (close) supervision of a more experienced brain surgeon.
I love Tal. He makes me laugh. He throws all his pieces at the corner like a child, but it works in astonishment. He has a quote about what he thinks about when making a move, and says he considers how to sac his queen first, then rook, bishops, knights. Unconventional wisdom at its finest.
