Practice May Not Make Perfect, But It’s the Only Way to Ever Come Close
When asked how does one get better as an actor, artist, musician, writer, fill-in-the-blank etc., the answer often comes down to one word.
Practice.
But it’s not just a word. It’s a matter of putting in the effort.
Work is called work for a reason. It’s not easy, and it’s not immediate. It’s a result of labor – it comes from hours poring over a manuscript and nitpicking every single word, rewriting that ending five times so it packs the punch you’re after, getting as much feedback as you can so you are sure that your words ring true in the way that you meant them to…
And to make your work stronger, to make it grow, you have to feed it your time. I’m not just talking a couple of hours every third Saturday when you’re bored because the game got cancelled. Because every creative endeavor is a hungry beast, never satisfied, and a couple of hours a month just isn’t going to cut it. In order to make your work good, you have to nurture it. The Infinite Monkey Theorum requires an inestimable number of monkeys tapping away at typewriters over an incomprehensible amount of time in order to eventually possibly replicate Shakespeare (among so many other random things, not all worthy), and even in that ever-expanding alternate universe, I think we may be lowballing the actuality of the ask (there’d certainly be a lot of crap to sift through to find the Shakespeare you were seeking). So seriously, your novel isn’t going to write itself. To make your work happen, you have to do it by building it into your routine and putting in the time – you have to make it important.
But that takes effort. It means forcing yourself to sit and work even if you aren’t feeling it, even if you think whatever you’re doing at that moment is crap and you’ve rewritten the same bad sentence four times, even if all that you can muster is to write a poorly planned outline for a story that you’ll probably never finish fleshing out… Building a routine means actually writing out that story that’s been sitting in your head for the last two years, not just casually noting it in your journal and getting distracted by your next big, shiny idea while never finishing what you started. Pushing through those moments is important because it’s those struggles that lead us to look at things in new and different ways, to solve problems, to make our work actually matter, actually manifest. It’s this drive to improve that leads us to seek others’ opinions, to attend workshops, to read blog posts like this. Because there is always room for improvement, new forms to learn, new tricks to master. And we have to up our game if we want to be competitive.
The competition is stiff. It’s a harsh reality, but there are hundreds, nay thousands – probably even millions – of writers out there, all trying to get their work published. And, as said writers, we create amazing ways to collaborate and to lift one another up, to create networks of support like this one. I have never seen so much outreach and opportunity as I am seeing right now in the whole of the literary community – we are more connected than ever. But there is still a lot of competition, especially when it comes to viewership, to get your work in print where it can be seen outside of the limited scope of your own personal pet projects. One call for writing can get hundreds of submissions for a coveted ten or twelve slots. And there are hundreds, nay thousands, of such calls, the outputs of which are still vying for limited readership. If you want to really be in the running, you have to be at your peak performance. You have to make something worth reading. You have to do your research, to find someplace where your words will fit, that gets you. So, at the end of the day, it all comes down to you, honing your craft, learning how and where to make your words count.
And that takes practice.
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