Practice Makes Perfect

A cheeky post about a talent I’d love to have…but don’t. 

A talent I would love to have, but don’t is writing. Now before that makes you burst out loud laughing, let me let you in on a secret: writing don’t come naturally. Good writing even less so. Writing is a habit learned. Good writing is that well-timed butterfly-net capture of an inspiration that the other guy just missed, that happens only during hours and hours of practicing the habit, the discipline of writing. Words don’t come easy the song so forlornly expresses. Guess what. It’s true. Words don’t come easy. I’ll add to that, the right words come even less so. And then further to that, when rereading your words jotted habitually down, the process of omitting needless words is even more challenging than writing a lot of words in the first place. There is meaning to consider, there is continuity of plot, there is flow of story, there is impact, there is creativity, all to consider. There is the overall theme that runs through it to consider. It flabbergasts me how a person can claim to have writing talent or how one can ascribe to a writer the notion of talent.
I’ll attempt to support my view point here. First off, there are many other things than talent, that writing IS, definitely; it is sacrifice, it is concentrated precision; it is repeated failure and rejections; it is habit – formed through daily discipline and at the end of the day, it is business, creative, yes, but pure and simple business. Pay me for my words, else I cannot eat tonight. To say that someone has talent as a writer is inconsiderate of the sacrifices of discipline that simply must be made constantly, that a person who writes as an avocation, makes continually to get to the level of writing we judge as “good”.

Quick we are in these times to call ourselves writers. It is on the one hand and in the best sense a romantic notion. It is on the other hand and in the worst sense the belief of both mal-intention-ed ideologues and well-intention-ed idealists that ascribe themselves the title but in so doing usurp the title by their own innocent and child-like arrogant chase for “social justice” and fame, respectively. They label themselves such; Writers, having not necessarily sacrificed time, effort, and bits of their own soul to experience the privilege it is, when true inspiration is caught in that butterfly net of practice, practice, practice. Yes. That's how it is. Sorry to burst your assumptive bubble. 

A talent I wish I had but I don’t is writing. I don’t think anybody in this world does. Because writing is not a talent. Writing is rather the process of building a symptomatically recognizable level of competence in arranging words. An acute process of transcribing trains of lucid thought, a chronic process of catching elusive butterflies of inspiration, deftly, without crushing their wings, then by arranging words competently, unveiling the unseen patterns in those slowly-flapping panels.
Ironically, butterflies seem to alight most-times on animal fecal matter. As if to say, Hey you self-ascribed writer! Stop contributing to the production of this mountainous pile of dog shit! 

In fact, why don’t you stop scooping up and splatting the shit on your screen and making it out to be inspirational. Start looking instead at the hypnotically flapping panels of yellows, oranges, satin blues and midnight blacks alighted there just above the seething reek. So it is with writing. Day by day people calling themselves writers add to the piles and piles of dog shit being published daily and occasionally, there flutters down and rests on that pile of dog shit a butterfly. Did you ever catch an alighting butterfly on dog shit, deftly, without crushing its wings? 

 Did you ever lucidly extract every detail of that moment when you recognized the butterfly in the middle of the shit pile and then in coherent, lively, concise and impactful words CAPTURE the inspiration? If you did that once a day, that would make you a pretty good writer, I trow. But talented? In the words of today’s, You-tuber tribe I would answer “Meh…”. Or maybe you would just nod in oblivious agreement, then go back to blindly contributing to the pile of dog shit without seeing the butterfly that just fluttered by…. Too bad I caught it, with my practiced net-swoop, and unveiled it, not you.

I write

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