“Practice makes perfect.”
How many times have you heard your parents say that?
For me, that saying was right up there with, “We’ll do that (exciting thing) one day.”
And “No, we can’t wrap up your uneaten pork chop and send it to Africa to feed the hungry.”
Okay, yeah, I have parental issues.
Wacky Scenario...
So, one day, I decide I'd like to be a body builder. I read one lousy article on the profession, get inspired, and say, "Yup, that's the thing for me!"
So, I head to the gym, and lift weights until I can't lift weights anymore. I head home, feeling grrreat! The next morning, I awake, and I can't move for crying, "Mommy!" Every muscle in my body is screaming at me... saying,
"What in the holy heavenly hash did you do to us??? The last thing we muscles remember is your love of the couch and Netflix."
I end up in such pain I don't return to the gym for weeks, maybe months, maybe never, because the trauma on my body was too great.
~~~
Hey, you hackers of words out there... you getting my drift?
~~~
Muscles can't be expected to perform to Olympic standards right out of the gate... if they've never even seen a gate.
Those muscles need to be trained to perform, right? Right?
"Everyone knows this, B.J.," you say.
"Oh, really," I say. "Then why do you think your writer muscle can go from lifting 0 words per day to 2 grand, in under a day, every day?"
From you, I hear *crickets*.
~~~
Like with every other skill humans can acquire, we do it over time and through practice. Humans are not gods. We need to train, learn, and train some more. And we writers need to train in intervals our never-before-used writer muscle can withstand. Otherwise, that muscle receives trauma, and it drops working on that manuscript, possibly never picking it up again.
Sound familiar?
HOMEWORK: If you haven't yet done this, keep a 2-week diary of when your time and energy is at that free/sweet spot, and once you know when your writing sessions can occur per day/week, set yourself a word count goal for each session.... then CUT THAT NUMBER IN HALF.
Yep. You read me right. Half that sucker. Heck, maybe even quarter it.
Your writer muscle can't hack out 2 grand/day if you've never worked it like that before.
For you, CONSISTENCY is better than word count. Seriously.
I'd rather see you open your laptop every day for the next week, plunk out the word, "the," close your laptop, and REPEAT that process til the end of the week, than see you grunt and groan out 2 grand on one single day, and never open that laptop again.
The KEY: Up your word count GRADUALLY, OVER TIME.
The LONG TERM HOMEWORK: Write EVERY DAY for the next 42 DAYS, even if all you write are 42 "the's."
The FACT: It takes a human at least 6 weeks to move an action into an automatic habit. 42 days.
Now, be off with your skimpy writer muscle, and start training that sucker.
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| Morty Muscle... ready and rarin' to go! |
An apprentice welder.
He's in a welding course. His work is overseen by his instructor. He works as a trainee with a welding firm. He attempts his first on-the-job weld. The solder mix was wrong. It didn't hold. He had to re-do and try again. After a couple more tries, the weld holds. His brain stores the correct weld mix ratio, the correct torch work, and on his next job, he's still nervous, but by gosh, he did it again. The weld held, and it was a professional attempt. Thereafter, with each successful try, his confidence in his skill rises, to the point that one day in the future, he will instruct others beginner welders, and the skill cycle marches on.
Sound familiar?
The ONLY Secret Sauce in a successful career is the gaining of confidence through trying, over and over, until the gaffes appear less with the developing skill.
I don't care if you're a welder, a bus driver, an IT programmer or a book writer. At some point, you must try. You must attempt to formulate on the skills you presently have to create a finished end, knowing that with each attempt, your skill increases, and so does that initially elusive confidence.
No one can make you try. You must decide to do that on your own, to accept that the gaffes will come, and with them a greater sense of what it takes to be a successful wordsmith.
The Secret Sauce is you. Your willingness to put it all on the line to create. There is no safety net in your draft. You don't need one to finish your manuscript. That comes once the draft is done, and you rely on beta readers and an editor to insure your best result is presented.
But without your determination to try and to complete that draft, no amount of anything or anyone can help you. That completed draft is up to you.
Your Secret Sauce is in your will power, your fortitude, your acceptance of a level below perfect.
With each sentence, paragraph, scene and chapter, you are building onto the foundation to create a whole storied house. That construction — an imagined idea to a real entity, a book — is only in your hands.
Courage + Fortitude + Willingness to Make Mistakes + Desire to Learn from Mistakes = Writer Confidence = Secret Sauce.
You alone are the creator. If you do not create your vision, no one else can. That book will never be written without your attempt.
Are you okay with the world not having your book? I bet you aren't.
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| Photo, A Poetic and Powerful Life |
Success on this earth sadly coincides with that wives tale your mother told you as a wee tot...
"Practice makes perfect."
I seriously would like to punch out the first wife who uttered that truism, not because she was wrong, but because she was right, as every time I hear it, well, punching something springs to my frustrated mind.
Hey, I never said I was perfect.
As that first wife rightfully knew, in any endeavor, practice is what's needed for the apprentice. Tons and tons, truck loads, even. I don't care if you weld metal things, do wood joinery, or, say, weirdly enough, want to finish writing a book. That damn adage pops up and splashes righteous goo in your face that CANNOT be washed off. Crikey! So annoying...
But here's what happens when you DO practice writing, every day, and for the rest of your life:
Over time, you develop what experienced wordsmiths call the Creative Ear. And this skill ONLY develops while a writer writes. Not when he's waxing poetic smack in front of hangers-on at some high-brow cocktail lounge... (Okay, that last visual may have been too specific, and too me. Again, I'm not perfect.)
The Creative Ear is the ability to better, easier, hone-in on the best writing ideas, the best phraseology, the best literary delivery for any piece. And the more you write, the better that intuitive skill develops, and the less post-draft editing crying jags you'll have to endure.
[An Aside: This is the main reason why I'm so against the "pantser" writing mentality — the post-draft edits. I'm of Northern-Irish descent, and we Irishmen are inherently lazy. (Stop throwing rotten tomatoes and let me finish, my fellow Pot o' Golders!) What I mean to say is that we do NOT like to do things twice when once will suffice. It cuts into our after-hours drinking time. (Again, stop with the tomatoes!) And by twice, I mean the 30 BILLION TIMES pantsers WILL have to rewrite sentences, reshape the plot line, reformat character personality traits/motivation in their schizophrenic, airy-fairy first draft attempt because they had no pre-determined parameters. Why a person desires to get lost in a forest and die of hypothermia, and his emaciated corpse be nibbled on by centipedes when a perfectly good hiking path is on offer, I'll never know. Aside tangent is over. Whew! I feel better now... ;-)]
Back to the Creative Ear...
When a writer does not regularly start, work on and finish sentences, paragraphs, chapters, stories, his creative intuition for what works and what doesn't, doesn't become refined. It's like a blind man who doesn't practice walking with a stick and feeling for objects, to know what's what and where things belong. That Second Sense skill must be worked on to be enhanced.
With new writers, they aren't capable of intuitively sensing when a sentence or phrase or chapter arc has been best achieved, if they haven't failed and succeeded many, many times in the attempt.
This literary "blindness" I have often demonstrated, not by teaching, but by showing. This is not something I like to do, as I never want to stain my way onto another artist, but the Creative Ear is not a tangible entity, a normal material skill. I can tell new writers over and over again what makes a good sentence, a good scene. They will nod in agreement, but still not deliver the goods in their own works. Their sentences, scenes will be wordy, convoluted, until I simply take one of their sentences or paragraphs, and rewrite it, and show them the difference. Then, I'll get,
"Oh, that's way better! Why didn't I see that way of writing it before?"
It's simply the development of the Creative Ear that gets a writer from apprentice to master, from a blind man who is lost to finally "seeing" the way. And other than constant practice, that ability will not mature, and a world of edit hurt will remain in that writer's future.
No one is born having a fully-developed Creative Ear. Yes, there can be those >1% prodigies, but I assure you, you and I are not one. The Creative Ear cannot be taught. A person can be taught grammatical rules, form and function, but that intuitive sense is simply:
God-given artistic/creative slant + constant and unending practice = literary success, the ability to sense a well-crafted work.
[Another Aside: people who scoff at writers who edit a passage as they write the first draft haven't a clue as to what a mature Creative Ear can achieve in this instance. Such a skilled wordsmith isn't watering down the first draft passion; more so, he's seeing immediately how that draft can be worded as he writes, eliminating a huge percentage of edit rewrites at draft end. This isn't talked about much by writers who use this method because they know it's not industry accepted. But if you do a search, you will find well-celebrated similar method authors, who have far fewer meltdowns come the editing phase. Second aside tangent over and out.]
Your Creative Ear.
Accept that it exists in you right now, but that it needs severe practice to mature.
Every day. In attempts which fail, and succeed.
Not ruminating...
Not entertaining your imagined muse...
Not waxing poetic with your tribe... will help.
Just the hard, slogging work of constantly throwing together words to form a cohesive and effective idea.
[Last Aside: that's another reason why I call writing, as in any learned endeavor, work, not mere fun.]
HOMEWORK: Sit thyself down, and make this Day One of further developing your Creative Ear. Write something, anything. Just write.
