Practice, Never Mind Perfect

Since the beginning of February I have been doing this online writing thing -- not this blog, but as part of a group that pays to participate.  For the first ten days we sent a thousand words a day but now we are in a much mellower plan, sending one piece a week.  The teacher/coach reads our work but doesn't comment unless we request a meeting, I guess.  The point is to be accountable and to keep writing, no matter what.  (It's a little bit how I feel about this blog lately. If people are still reading, I feel like I need to be accountable. When you stop reading, I guess I will stop posting this particular blog and find a new venue.) Every Monday he sends an encouraging message out with a bunch of different suggestions for how to start.  It may just be one word that can spark a lot of thoughts or it could be a technique that he wants you to try.

As you know, I tend to write only what I know about first hand, close up. I write stories about the world I inhabit.  This is a lifelong practice, it makes me happy, and I have found various ways to share my stories without having to do anything drastic (like rewrite a lot of times, or find some way to publish, all of those steps seem like more than I want to attempt).

This week's suggestion was to try to write in a genre you have never attempted before.  Write a poem if you never do, write a memoir piece if you are a fiction writer.  I am pretty sure I have not tried to write fiction since I was in elementary school. It seems to me you need to have something in mind, a plot, an idea. That just isn't how I think.  But last night I sat down with my laptop on the deck at Timothy's, looking out over the fields to the west (one of many beautiful vistas on this farm) and started to describe a beach scene.  Rebecca always tells me that fiction is about a character that comes to some sort of a crisis, or a situation that needs to be resolved.  I didn't have a character in mind but I was just doing what I was told, writing for half an hour to see what happened.  The weirdest thing happened.  I made up someone named Nadya who had a sister named Bela.  They had deep sadness and were terrible at talking about it.  They had a fight. Now, none of this is part of my own experience. So it seems like my idea of writing fiction is you just have to make every single thing up. I know this is totally not the wisdom of real writers -- you are to write what you know. But I do that all the time, so it seems I took this as an opportunity to write what you don't know.  It is kind of embarrassing to do that.  Since it was a short story, I didn't feel the need to wrap it all up in a bow -- that's how all the short stories are in the New Yorker these days. Full of weird uncertainty.

Recently I heard a piece of wisdom that made me laugh: "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." I have been thinking about this as I go through my day and I think it has a lot of truth. It doesn't mean you are supposed to do things badly, it means that you have to try.  As an example, I am too big and lumpy to get out of the pool by just climbing over the side so I always have to make my way to the ladder at the corner and pull myself up that way.  But a few days ago I decided I want to be able to get out of the pool anywhere even if I am too big to do it gracefully. I happened to be at the pool all by myself, with just the lifeguard, so I told him "don't look at me, I want to try to learn how to get out without the ladder...I'm going to look like a beached whale." He said "I have all these people to watch over on this other side. No judgment here." As I said, there was only me.  So every time I got to the end of the pool, I hauled myself out. It wasn't pretty, I was doing it any way I could, and little by little I got better at it.  Doing it badly was good enough. The lifeguard was exquisitely uninterested.

There are so many examples that make that statement feel right to me. Not sure that it applies to me and writing fiction, but I do agree that it is always good to stretch, to try new stuff. So what if your characters are Russian and have deep sorrow and don't know how to communicate.  Practice is what makes yoga so good, what makes learning to play piano fun, what makes meditation addictive. 

Come on, y'all. Tell me what you have been doing badly lately because it was better than not doing it at all.