How Learning to Play the Piano is like Learning to Write

So many of the lessons I learn that really sink in are learned when I have to explain simple concepts to my children.  Today my eight year-old daughter came home from early-out day and was looking forward to a leisurely afternoon of making a gourmet snack (she considers herself to be quite the expert chef), reading some books, playing with Legos and just generally doing whatever it is that eight year-olds dream about doing on long afternoons during the school year.  Sadly, I informed her after her low-blood-sugared self was fed and dehydrated that before she could play to her hearts content, she needed to get her thirty minutes of piano practice done first.  Thirty minutes.  To an eight year-old it sounds like an eternity.  So she went downstairs and started plunking away.  About ten minutes in I heard her making up an interesting jazz New Orleans-esque piece that, while lovely and artistic, was not part of her required practice.  So I called down the stairs, "That doesn't count as practice!"

In the meantime, I was folding laundry upstairs and thinking about a difficult morning in a graduate-level writing course where a few chapters of my current work-in-progress were critiqued.  Note: I started my current manuscript in May and am on the third draft, having literally re-typed the entire thing 2 1/2 times now (that is how I revise; strange, perhaps, but it works).  And in workshop I found out that I have two major plot issues in the first 48 pages that need re-working. These issues are not such that I can easily go back and fix them/tweak them here or there.  Rather, I probably need to go back and re-type the entire 48 pages that I was so happy to be done with.  So, I was feeling a little bit unmotivated as I folded my laundry when I realized that perhaps I should take my own advice/instruction that I was giving to my daughter.

1. Put in the time whether you want to or not.  This is simply stated and even simpler to do if you commit to it.  My daughter has to practice thirty minutes a day whether she wants to or not.  I have to write sixty minutes a day whether I like to or not.

2. Play time does not count.  I recently attended an authors event in SLC where I was surprised to hear that many of them have the same routine as me when they start writing--they check their email, they check Facebook, they check every available social media then finally when they run out of things to check (some even re-check after going through the cycle to see if anything new has come out), THEN they start to write.  But play time at the piano is not practice.  Play time at the computer is not writing. 

3. Set a timer.  This is something I am seriously considering doing with my writing time.  For my daughter, that timer works like magic.  It goes on and she gets going and usually (today is not a good example) gets focused.  For me, I have word count goals (currently set at 2,000 per day) but a timer would be an excellent visual reminder that once it starts, it is WORK time, not PLAY time.  Additionally, if I happen to be working quickly one day, I can use the timer as incentive to keep going rather than quit just because I achieved my word count goal.

So there are my thoughts for today.  I am going to get to those darn revisions this week and try not to mentally complain to myself too much, working on actually WORKING when I am sitting at my computer, and try the timer method.  We'll see how it goes. 

What Is This Blog About?

People create blogs for all sorts of reasons.  This blog will be specifically to document my work as a writer.  As I am at the beginning of my writing career, I hope that my posts, thoughts, and stories will document the experience of a new writer as well as provide helpful insight to those who are on the same road, both ahead of me and behind me.  For all of us, there comes a time in life when we must ask ourselves what it is that we want most or, as one person I recently heard say, "What would you do if you knew you could not fail?"  For me, this was one of the scariest questions I have ever asked myself.  Fear of facing your most serious dreams is almost paralyzing.  To acknolwedge them, and then actually start working towards them means that you are accepting the idea that it might not work out, that you might fail, that the things you had hoped for may never actually happen.  But I have found over the past 6 months that trying and failing is better than never trying at all.  A simple truth, perhaps; one that we hear often, but one that only really means something once you have tried it yourself.  So go ahead, ask yourself: What would I do if I knew I could not fail?  The answer may surprise you, may force you to go back decades to when you were young and carefree and dreamed without constraint, or may make you realize that perhaps you are already doing that exact thing.  What would I do if I knew I could not fail?  The answer for me was simple: write.  So that's what I am finally doing.