Let the Wrong Notes Float

There’s a quote somewhere about how you have to write ten awful pages in order to just get one good one, but I can’t find it. But it underscores the point I want to make here:

Relentless practice is part of the deal.

The only thing is, for us writers, our practice looks different than that of other artists—because it leaves a literal paper trail. And we get hung up on that paper trail. We tend to view it as though it should be our finished product, when nothing could be farther from the truth.

Not long ago, one of my clients—a beginning YA novelist—was feeling discouraged about needing to go back and revisit a section of his outline in order to make his main character’s behaviour more consistent with their true nature. I could feel his disappointment hanging in the air between us: So much rewriting.

Right then, the universe gave me the perfect analogy to ease his dismay and put the work into perspective.

“Think of it like this,” I said. “When a musician practices their chords, any mistakes just float away into the air. They don’t see all their practice written down somewhere. When a dancer is rehearsing a move over and over, they don’t leave a record of all their practice.”

A light went on in his eyes.

“But as writers,” I continued, “we tend to feel that once our words are on the page…the work is mostly finished. Our practice happens to be explicit and recorded. But we need to remember that it’s practice, even though it’s written down—and even if there’s a ton of it.”

When a swimmer hits his turn too early and misses that solid push-off from the wall, the waves wash away any lasting evidence of his miscalculation.

When a potter takes a risk and creates a too-tall vase, and when the spinning wheel gives that too-tall vase a wilting slouch, she pulls the clay back together and starts again.

My writer loved having this new way of framing his work. “That’s really helpful,” he said.

The musician, the potter, the dancer, the swimmer—all these specialists understand that practice is part of mastery. They don’t come to the studio or the pool with the inward expectation that they’re going to nail it on the first pass. Or the eleventh. They recognize that it’ll take some time to get all the neurons firing in proper sequence to deliver a perfect end product. Lots of time. Lots of repetition.

Watching the pages pile up on the cutting-room floor can feel like maybe you’re not meant to write books, after all. Hearing a coach break the news that you need to restructure your story’s foundation when thought your manuscript was ready for pitching is like being told you need to go back to infancy and grow your body all over again.

It can feel discouraging.

A book takes a very long time to write, in part because there is much practice involved. If you sit down and write your book in a straight shot from start to finish, it’ll be a disaster. Same as if a violinist played a new song straight through in a single shot. It’d be wobbly, wouldn’t it? We would rather hear that song after she has practiced a fair bit.

You need those periods of reading back over your pages, making changes, striking sections, moving phrases from one place to another, trying the words in a different way. Writing pages about character backstory that’ll never see the light of day (except in more finely rendered characters). Writing pages about why you’re writing this book in the first place. Writing scenes badly, then rewriting them, and then writing them all over again.

As a writer, your practice is “sticky”. It’s captured on the page, right in front of your eyes. You can see it, obsess over it, convince yourself that it’s good enough to use in your final performance.

But it’s not. It’s practice. Let it go.

And go do more.