I love and hate to practice. I like to work hard and get into a zone when I focus on something. I can sometimes get into a zone when I’m practicing something new, or something difficult. But a lot of the time, man, it’s just hard and it feels like I’m not getting better. Sometimes, when I really stretch, I get exhausted doing something simple for an hour, and then feel like I need a nap.
That feeling is actually a good one, because I know what it means now; it means I pushed myself to the edge or slightly past my comfort zone, and was really working on something new in terms of skill improvement. I know this, right now, as I’m typing it. But my achilles heel is that I will forget that, and then fall into a bad pattern from time to time. Namely, I get so frustrated that I step away from what I’m doing for days (sometimes a week or more!) because what I worked on didn’t come out perfect.
Yet, almost every time, the moment I go back to that thing I was trying to push past, I’ve either gotten it (and am ready to move on to the next thing), or I’ve gotten better enough at it that I can pay attention more closely to what to improve.
It’s good, from time to time, to sit down and focus on, “how do I get better at this thing I think is important?” If you’re lucky, you have people who know how to help you critique. I used to like online writing circles, but then I realized, a lot of the people I was around focused on personal tastes, but on technical bits to improve. I had to focus on that myself, and learn it. “What are the weaknesses here? What do you have to fix?” Like, for a long time, I used to have this habit where I’d use some word and then immediately reuse it. “The affectation was laborious, and drove people around him nuts. They had to put in intense labors to ignore the terrible accent.” I’d do that kind of thing ALL THE TIME. I had to do exercises to avoid it, and either make sure I caught it in a first draft or always found them in a revision.
Writing is like anything else. It’s a skill. You can have ‘gifts’, or talents, but it’s all a myth. Talent is the soil, it’s all about your ability to quickly learn how to do some thing you want to do. If you have a talent for farming, if I show you how to plant lettuce, you’ll learn that initial skill quickly. But if you want to become a great farmer, you have to practice everything that goes into that, over and over again, until it’s natural.
The most boring thing in the world to watch is a writer revising drafts. Think of the word striver. Generally means someone who works and works at something, trying to improve. Think of the word genius; it implies someone who’s ideas emerge fully formed from the head of Zeus, as if lightning struck them and they produced magic. Some artists, knowing the world as they do, are so afraid of being seen as a striver that they hide the mess, the work, all the stuff that was never good enough. Others don’t care. There’s no right or wrong answer when it comes to what you want to share.
But there is work, toil, just day after day. But the key, the most important thing, is not to simply toil and do the same thing every day if your goal is to get better. The key is to look for the thing you want to get better at it, focus on it like a laser, then get better at it. You keep doing that enough times, and suddenly your skills have gone up. It’s not enough to run a mile every day, if the goal is to get a faster mile time. You have to figure out why your mile time is at a limit, then work on adjustments, small ones, over and over, until the net affect is a break through.
And then, when it’s time to perform for other people, to do work not beyond your current skill set, but either right at it or just below, you can dazzle, you can shine, you can show the world just who you really are. That’s the ballet dancer, doing toe points for ten years, until they are in the background of Swan Lake, dancing perfection. That’s the writer, burning away weaknesses in their scripting, until they can write a draft in their sleep. That’s all of us, who want to be the best they can possibly be, focusing their efforts, to make those improvements.
Kaizen, the little pushes, the everyday changes, turn you from someone who can’t sing or play an instrument into someone who can sing in front of an audience and only throw up after it’s all done.