Practice Makes Perfect

Writing requires practice.

A while ago, if you had asked me what that meant, I would have replied that you just do the writing each day. The consistency constituted the practice for me. And, to some extent, it still does. But, there is more.

I learned that there was more when I began to link my singing practice to my writing practice. This month, November, I have challenged myself to increase my breath capacity by singing in plank position and doing breathing exercises. This requires me to do the same activities each day. In that way, the consistency is the practice. The repetition deserves a shout out as well.

For those of us who are interested in writing poems, prose, essays, how often do you copy poems or sentences? I would suggest that you copy word for word, line for line the poems and sentences that strike you. In singing, this would be like pausing the song and singing what you’ve just heard. I suggest this because you get a different feel for the sentence when you write it yourself: where’s the rhythm, how does the punctuation function, what do the polysyllabic words do?

When I have copied a poem, I can understand its structure better. Copying the work doesn’t make you an expert but it does change your relationship from reader to writer. In so doing, you notice facets of the syntax or the metaphors that were not obvious until they were on your page.

For those of us exploring new genres, how often do we map what we’ve read? When I decided to buckle down with poetry, I read a lot of poetry. Much of it did not sway me. Of the poems and poets that did, I would go line by line, section by section and ask myself what elements (and in what order) made the poem function well for me? To be fair, I did this with critical writing as well: what elements do good introductions have? What elements do well-written chapters have?

After you’ve mapped out the writing, use that map as a prompt for your own writing. One of my favorite poems that I’ve written “Here’s the thing: Bats aren’t actually blind” comes out of this exercise. I read a poem from the Poems-a-day emails, and I mapped it out. The result was that poem.

If you choose to either one of these, please let me know how it goes!