Back to Basics (Part 7) – Practice!

I’ve been writing professionally since Richard Nixon was President.  But I went on holiday for the better part of two decades, and it’s taken me a month to get my mojo back (if indeed I have begun to mojinate) ….

Remember when you were a kid, and you could run barefoot across the fields – all day long, without hardly breaking a sweat?  When you got to the high school track team, you shod yourself with metal spikes and accepted mentoring from some quasi-sadistic math teacher wannabe who forced you to practice block bursts, to practice turn technique and to practice elbow stride until they became second nature.

Today, decades later, parallel elbow stride make jogging sessions a little less taxing.  No longer do you wear shorts (cutoffs or team-clad), having long since abandoned any thought of exposing hairy legs to the elements in favor of comfy gray sweats.  All the practice on the turns makes it a little less likely you’ll slip on a patch of ice on that first Adidas-shod session following proclamation of your New Year’s Resolutions.

The practice of your youth still lends competence and maturity to your stride.  But only the tribulatory practice of a quasi-daily regimen would ever again bring you within spitting distance of a 12-flat hundred or a 5-minute mile.

Writing is a marathon. 

That marathon consists of nightmarish sprints, hurdles, endless challenges of many miles to go before you sleep … all scrumpled in with the 26-mile, 385-yard curse of the courier – sprint to herald the conquest and then you die – a conjugational, convoluted, convocational marathon convulsion of the author’s yearning to be heard.

Practice writing as you would train for a marathon.

Practice writing as if you were straining to avoid embarrassment at a piano recital.

Practice like the next home game pits you one-on-one with LeBron.

Practice because you know you’ll only get one chance, on bended knee, to sway her with the question you mean to pop.

Practice writing as if your livelihood depended upon it – for if writing is in any way involved with your vocation of choice, it does.

Now, despite what NFL gurus and blue-haired piano teachers may try to tell you, let me debunk a myth about “perfect practice.”  Practice alone does make perfect.  The written word morphs to the beat of a devil-went-down-to-Georgia fiddler straddling the high-wire demarcation of the space-time continuum.  Wait for a thought to be “perfect” and it will never meet with the page in this or any alternative universe.

Get it down.  Try it out.  Listen to it.  Think about it.  Parse it.  Cull it.  Tweak it.  Cut it.

But do SOMETHING!  That’s practice.

One more word, parenthetically: A piano teacher used to urge me to practice at the keyboard for an hour a day … and to practice in front of a record player for an hour more, listening to masters performing the same Chopin nocturne I sought to passably reproduce.

Listening is practice, he said, and in that same vein I urge you, dear reader, to listen to orators great and small; read the great writers and their flailing imitators.  Puddle around the internet.  Lurk in chat rooms and boards of every description, pining to hear the fresh turn of a phrase, the newly fashionable word.

On average, True Writers only work half a day – the practicing consumes the other 12 hours.

Next: Back to Basics (Part 8) – Love!

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]