Tag Archives: practice

Practice: Good Practice

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Good practice is practice that moves you forward. Obviously.

Wait, come back.

When I was young, I played the flute. Mostly I played the flute because my dad had played the flute and playing an instrument was a thing you did in my hometown. I was technically terrible. I felt no music in my heart. My favorite part of practice was standing with legs spread on either side of my Labrador who insisted on laying down in front of my music stand. When I played notes that were too high for her, she stood up. It was terribly exciting.

I could play all the scales, and when looking at the music on the stand, I could make a solid effort at the marches and church music. I could listen to the metronome or play while it was also on, but neither were particularly connected. A funny thing started to happen.

Eventually, I got better.

At the same time I was struggling through basic musical expression, I was taking math courses harder than anyone thought possible for me*. When the math added concepts like variables and matrices and proofs, the lower level addition-subtraction-multiplication-division got to be quick as a thought. Which was how fast I needed to perform it when I played.

My first writing mentor** told me to listen to dialogue around me in order to develop the sense for natural speech in my writing. During this time, I kept reading books (which I still do) and someone at a seminar talked about removing all the unnecessary parts of conversation. We don’t need the uhm, the mhm, the mmm, the uh, the hi how are you. We need the important part of the conversation. Somewhere in all those books that had gone through agents and editors galore were the important parts of conversations.

In my good practice sessions, I figured out how to combine the “listening to conversation around” me, and the “necessary parts of conversation” for concise, character demonstrating, clear dialogue. I even figured out where to add the well-placed mmm and uh and the difference between hi how are you and hi you alright***.

Good practice moves me forward but it needs more techniques than the single thing that I think I’m practicing.

*When I was ten, I had a math homework worth 25 points. There were 24 questions, and you got an extra point for putting your name in the right place and spelling it correctly. I got 4%.

**In the grand tradition of small towns, Mrs. Betty L Speckles was a friend of my mom’s from quilt guild. When she found out that Betty had published some poems, my mom asked if Betty would give me some pointers. I am forever grateful that she said yes.

***Hi you alright is the British greeting and the answer is Yeah. Or Yes. Or the American ignore and move on because you honestly have no idea how to answer it. I entered the country in September and did not figure out how to answer that question until February.

Practice: Read More

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To be a good writer, you must read widely.

I don’t have to put that in quotation marks because every writing mentor, English teacher, writing friend, and writing book has told me the same thing. Substitute ‘more’ for widely, or ‘lots’. More than that. Even more. Read everything.

Read books. Read magazines. Read old letters. Read tweets and sub-tweets and screenshots sharing specific paired tweets. Read the hashtags, read the comments. Read parks. Read museum exhibits. Read cooking stores and clothing stores and high-end fashion, and don’t forget department stores. Read clever ice cream stores with branded cookbooks and a subscription service for ice cream pints.

My favorite thing to read is museum exhibits. One of the best I have seen was a show by Howardena Pindell during the 2018 spring season at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, IL*. It wasn’t just art that made the show memorable. The exhibit began with Pindell’s early media of choice, notably her work with paper dots and numerical patterns set in 3-D works. It moved to her exploration of themes and other media until the last room married theme and medium, so that her numerical patterns became an exploration of social justice. To one side of the dramatic works, there was an early work again, a piece consisting of an acrylic box filled with paper dots. Walking through the exhibit, we witnessed how the artist changed from a young artist experimenting with novel media to a mature artist exploring interconnecting themes. As viewers, we were changed by the exploration of the marriage of media and theme, and I walked away with a better understanding of how media can enhance thematic expression and exploration.

It was a good book.

The whole time I was reading the exhibit, I was only ever aware that Pindell had created thought-provoking art. Yet, there were times I got the sense that she had struggled, or triumphed, or regretted.

Each piece in the exhibit, in most exhibits, has a little explanatory card which can say something about the media used in creation, the title, the number sequence of the piece. A really good little explanatory card will use the available space to tell me what I need to know, but leave enough space for me to work out my own interaction with the piece.

In bad experiences, the little card has told me not what I am seeing, but what to see, what to think, how to feel about it.

The more places and things I read and read about and read to compare to other places and things I have read, the more I understand how to leave space for the reader. It’s a work in progress, but I’m getting there.

* “What Remains To Be Seen”, April-May 2018, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL

Practice: Inhale, Exhale

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , , ,

I learned this opener and closer trick from Linda Sue Park, at a conference many years ago. Not that many years, but more than I would like to count.

The first and last sentence of your story make the first and last impression on your reader for the time that they inhabit your story world. The reader opens the book and takes the first breath of your story, and is enraptured all the way to the last sentence, when they exhale for the final time before closing the book and saying goodbye to your characters and their journey.

When you have finished your work, there’s a good chance you know what your last sentence needs to be. Or maybe your first sentence is perfect and you’ve kept writing two pages beyond where you should have stopped because you can’t find the ‘just right’ words. Consider that you already have the inspiration you need to create this purposeful art. The opener introduces the reader to the initial character perspective, the closer demonstrates the new, hard-won perspective. Take a look at Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian for an opener/closer duo.

Alternatively, if you have a great opener and closer, check that your character journey has come full circle from a normal world to a new normal post-story turmoil. For a movie version, take a look at Finding Nemo (post-prologue), where Nemo’s father is first terrified to allow his son out of the home, to the much more relaxed closing scene.

Practice: Copy Style

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Somewhere in college I had a very earnest travel literature teacher. He was actually pretty good; terribly enthusiastic about Mark Twain as we all should be, and as happy to talk about the world the authors lived in as he was to talk about their works.


One day, he talked to us about writing. One part of understanding travel literature or literature in general is understanding how that literature is created.


He recommended getting a notebook and hand writing a paragraph or two from a famous author, just to feel how the words came out of the pen. Do a page each day for a year and you will develop your own style.


What you’ll actually get is a keen understanding of other people’s styles. Try this instead. Get a notebook and write a paragraph of someone else’s work. Then try your own work in their style. Did you say enough? Did you say too little? How does the punctuation feel? Are you inspired to continue?
By practicing your words in another style you get incrementally closer to finding the one that pours forth and sounds irrevocably like the voice in your head when no others are speaking.


If this one doesn’t sound quite right, turn the page. Try again.


I didn’t keep it up for a year. I hit the normals like Hemingway and Shakespeare, and the not quite normals like Amy Tan, John Steinbeck. For a little while, I was terribly studious of the micro style. The comma placement, the sentence length, the rhetorical questions. It wasn’t until I turn to the macro style – the living setting, the satirical description, the single sentence reveal that upends the universe – that I discovered how to say what I was trying to say.

The comma placement in Steve Martin’s Pleasure of My Company told me less than the slight handful of sentences that revealed the core of the character. The short and devastatingly sensorial re-visitations of a single location in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the earnest and bombastic humor in Terry Pratchett and Mark Twain, the intertwining of physics and magic in Diane Duane’s Young Wizard series gave me permission. I could say what I wanted to say, the way I wanted to say it.