PRACTICE by Dianne Pearce

 

Picture is an overhead shot of many swimmers swimming in blue water with the word "PRACTICE" floating among them

Practice is to do something in a low-stakes environment that we will later do in a higher-stakes environment. Or so said the eighth-grade choir director when I was in eighth-grade choir. He encouraged us to keep singing, at home, in the shower, walking to school, to continue to turn each song into a well-oiled machine before we stood on stage in our long robes.

I took him very seriously, and by the time the concert came I was very well-oiled. 

This morning, for my first post of 2024, I got up before 6 am. I made coffee, fed the cats and the Guinea pigs, closed the bedroom door very firmly and quietly on the dog and my sleeping spouse, and sat down with my laptop in my lap, coffee by my side.

I'm not thirteen anymore. 

This means that there are pets to feed, and soon a child to wake and feed and layer with coats and bags and scarves and books and load into a car and drive to school before readying myself for my own meetings and work. 

It means that, best-laid plans, one of the cats has somehow managed to infiltrate the bedroom of the sleeping spouse, and is now clawing frantically to get out. The door will have marks on it like I locked in Freddie Krueger, if the noise is any indication, so I run as silently as possible to release the errant little bastard, and as I close the door again, quietly as a safe cracker, I hear the thump of the dog hitting the wood floor. NO! I silently run back to the laptop and coffee, refusing to notice the dog is awake.

 

Brett and Eddy from TwoSet Violin know all about practicing. My daughter is a huge fan, and we went to their tour when it came to Los Angeles in the fall. Everyone in the audience assured Brett and Eddy that they had practiced that day, but the guys were largely unconvinced. I know my daughter had not, so maybe they were more right than they knew. 

When I looked into the idea of practice I found that practice has some standard components to it:

~The first is to admit that learning and improving performance in anything is a challenge, and, as such, will be difficult, will not always work the first time. I remember when I read the infamous "tiger mom" article that Amy Chua had an exchange in there where her husband said something about her pushing the kids too hard, and she said, in effect, that, unlike her husband, she pushed her kids because she believed that they could do it.

That was transformative for me as a parent.

I don't parent like the tiger mom, but I do often counter resistence to homework, practice, new experiences, challenges, etc., by telling my daughter that I know that she can do it. I know it is already something she has the inner resources to conquer. Maybe it won't be perfect that day, that first time, but I know she has what it takes to do it, and to improve over time. It is a strategy that works really well, and she seems to value my confidence in her. In fact, she was doing the Meyers Briggs personality test yesterday at school, so she came home and did it last night for us, and she told us that she feels that she is, in general, a very confident person, so not afraid to try new things, new challenges. 

I don't remember having teachers or parents say that to me, that they knew I could do it, and I do remember feeling that, often, all the people my fellow eighth graders and I encountered were more convinced that we could not do it.

So for all of us here, now, reading, I will tell you what I now know from years of reading other people's writing and editing it: YOU can do it. You can do it, and you can get better at it too.

    ~ The next component of worthwhile practice is to limit the scope of the practice. You cannot do everything all at once. This is why I love short story writing. It's a muscle-builder for the long-haul novel. And blogging, though many folks who want to be authors hate it, is also a muscle-worker. It's a short burst of sustained writing. And it's a helpful way to get through your thoughts, the ones about your real actual life, the ones that get in the way of creating fiction, because you get them out, onto the page or screen, as it were, where you can look at them, see them, and dismiss them. Then you have brain-space to create something from nothing: you've cleared the work table.

    ~ Time. Ugh. This is the one that swallows me up. You have to give practice time, ideally every day. This may mean that on some days you write for five little teensy minutes, and others you get two hours. It ain't the amount, it's the consistency, as Brett and Eddy would certainly agree. And why is that? It's because when you carve out even a few minutes for something every day, or on set days of every week you communicate to your entire being that this thing is a thing of importance. And that makes your brain engage more, sit-up and take notice. Let's all tell ourselves that yes, the writing very much is worth a spot in our schedule over at least several days in our every weeks each month.

    ~ Walk with a buddy. Exercise with a friend. Study with a partner. This is not news to us. We've been hearting these kinds of phrases since the 1970s at least. And it's accurate advice. Whenever I am a speaker at a writing conference I find that being around all those writers makes me absolutely itch to write. When I was in my twenties there was a weekly open-mic night for writing only at a local Philly bar (no singing, no standup). It was incredible for my writing. I'm not going to say that what I heard in the late drunken hours at that bar each week amounted to Shakespeare, not at all. It was precisely the unpolished nature of the writing that made it so energizing for me. These were folks of all ages and all everything else you could imagine, hammering a way at their typewriters each week (yes, we were pre-laptops then). The only people who came to hear the writing were the people who came only so that they could get up and read their own writing. In other words: no one was coming to hear anyone read. Everyone was coming to read, and be listened to. It's a really important piece of the motivation, and why, whenever I run a workshop, or coach someone one-on-one, I ask the writer who has brought something to read it. It's the flame under the pot that gets things boiling. You, reading to someone, it juices the whole system. And it's why I'd recommend you start your own writing group, even if it meets monthly in a room at the library, and you read, and you listen. It's a part of practice. And it's what kids taking music lessons do. Each week they perform at their lessons, sometimes for other students, and sometimes just for the teacher.

    ~   The last suggestions go hand-in-hand, IMHO: to leverage any tools at your exposure, and to use coaching. Using tools teaches the person practicing that they can reach the level they want to, if they are smart enough to use assistance. There is a whole magilla of yoga I could not do without a strap and a block to help me. So, what are my choices? To miss out on a lot of yoga and feel like a flop, or to use the very useful tools. And then, with yoga as the continuing example, I have a yoga teacher, whether on a dvd that I use at home, or in a live class, there is someone who has more experience than me, who has seen people through missteps and pitfalls, who is going to do his/her/their level best to help me around, over, and through those. And while I will easily pay for yoga class, math tutoring for my daughter, music lessons, take my walking buddy out for coffee, buy a workout dvd, folks are reluctant, in general, to put any money into their writing practice. And we decide, don't we, the value of something based on what we're willing to pay for. I buy the more expensive olive oil because it vastly improves, IMHO, the taste of my pasta and salad. But one thing I see over and over again in all the groups I belong to based around writing is absolute outrage at the mere suggestion that any money to go from a writer to anyone else, a coach, a publication, a publisher. We have engendered nothing but negative feelings around an author paying for anything. The world should be opening its wallet to pay for our genius, but never should we be asked to part with anything in the nature of payment for any opportunities or assistance. After all, writing is our blood on the page, and we should be paid for our blood.

I put it to you that people give us their blood all the time and pay for us to take it: Brett and Eddy, they practiced for years to give us TwoSet Violin, paying for lessons and with their time, and giving us hours and hours of free entertainment in their videos. Comics write routines for themselves, and then spend years performing for free at bars. We pay the bar, but not them. Athletes pay for coaching, uniforms, and perform for free at the Olympics, college games, etc. Why are writers more special? Their blood sweat and tears more valuable? It's a whole mythology that comes from, I am guessing, the page-rate authors of bygone times, like the especially pugalistic Harlan Ellison, who eternally complained he was being cheated out of money that was owed to him.

No one is reading me. No one. If I could put out some money and change that situation, I would, because what I want is to be read, not paid. I'm an author. I'm in it for the audience, not the check. The check would be great, but it's never going to materialize without the audience. 

Does practice even matter in writing? 

I think it does, and I think it is the several disconnects around writing and practice that hold authors back from reaching their full potential as creators, not as earners. Don't get the two conflated or mixed up.

You might be a huge natural talent, but could you be better? You might have friends who read you, but could you reach a wider audience? 

Ask yourself what return you want: is it fans, money, fame? And what are you willing to do to achieve it? 

Natural talent is not going to get you there anymore, if that's even a valid thing. Were Brett and Eddy lucky guys who were born especially gifted in playing the violin? Or did they practice their way up that mountain? The days of an editor sitting in a building in New York desperately hoping for the next Vonnegut to mail some writing in are long over, if they ever even really existed behind the myth to the extent the myth would have us believe they did. Anyone accepting submissions anywhere is deluged by more cr@p than you can imagine, and precious few Vonneguts spring from wombs spontaneously.

Could practice be the key? The magic word?

To make your practice work for you, I suggest you first decide what your goal is. We're working with a business coach for our publishing company and almost the first thing he told us was that awards do (in his twenty or so years of experience) zero for a book, but authors want them more than anything else. And all you have to do is look at bios in any anthology to see how many authors list themselevs as Pushcart nominees. If awards are what you want, what you work for, what value does that bring you?

It's not incorrect to want awards, or selfish, or egotistical. Awards are great. I like getting them too, very much.

But what is ill-advised is going into your writing without a mind on the goal that you actually want.

I think you have choices, and some of those choices are: readers, fame, great stories, money, awards, talent, publications, bylines. I do not think you can get them all at once. I do not think writing the most wonderful book ever writtten is going to lead you to all of them. I mean, look at Van Gogh. Who today would turn down the chance to by a Van Gogh on Amazon for $14.99? And the guy never made a dime, or had fans or won awards in his lifetime. And if he published a painting on Amazon today, he probably couldn't even get a buy to give it a good review.

So, as I enter 2024, I want to up-my-game in the area of my writing practice. I want to look at the principles of practice and decide how I want to proceed with my practice based on what I want to achieve. I know that I am not going to reach my destination if I don't know what my destination is. I remember seeing a training skit where people in an office were asked where they wanted to go for lunch, and everyone said they didn't know. they were offered the choices: burgers, pizza, Chinese food. No one had any thoughts until one guy said pizza, and then everyone knew that what they actually wanted was Chinese.

So, you're going to direct your practice in 2024. What do you want? A specific award (the more directed you are the better)? A certain number of readers? A level of writing improvement? To be more creative? To make your first check as an author? To work with a coach? To find a community? Pizza? Chinese? Burgers?

If writing is our blood on the page, it is certainly worth our time in practice, and it is worth any tools we can find, afford, and use. It is worth our telling people about it. It is worth performing for a friend, writing peers, strangers.  To wait for the muse to strike, and then to feverishly scribble, and then to wait for the fame, awards, and money to roll in is not the way to do this thing, and it really never was.

Anyone who loves writing can find success, if they know what success is for them, and if they tailor their practice to head them in that direction.

So, as you start to consider your practice I leave you with a photo and a quotation from Brett and Eddy, the two best practicers I know: