treatswords

Practice is hard.

Finding the inspiration and humbling yourself enough to acknowledge the need for practice, ironically, takes practice.

This is a lesson that has taken my whole life to learn and I am still learning today.

To practice means to fight fear, to shove those “What-ifs” into the broom closet, their long toenails poking out from beneath the door. Practice means looking beneath the bed to see doubt lurking under there, seeing it’s white fangs and still asking it to come out.

My eight year old self knew this, without knowing this. This blonde hair, green eyed girl just loved to write.

My fingers racing over my keyboard in the middle of summer, my parent’s old Dell groaning through the afternoon, my word document growing in size as the summer melted it’s way inside. A sticky yellow substance on the windows, mom will have to clean that later, I thought.

My friends playing in the summer breeze, the sun making a dark outline around their tank tops. The phone ringing, “Cali, want to meet us at the park?”

“I can’t.. I’m writing.”

I worked vigorously and effortlessly on my first novel. It was a 263 paged psychological thriller about a young girl named Libby who had multiple personality disorder. Secret Window had been my biggest inspiration that year. I didn’t know it at the time but I was practicing then, without fear, without thought. I was just doing what I loved to do because I loved to do it.

The older I became, the more fear kept showing up at my doorstep. It’s heavy hand knocking at the door, a looming shadow shifting in the window. I didn’t know I had to practice to become better at my craft, I just thought since I was born with the desire to write, it would always be there, a brilliant story like a tattoo on my heart, permanent and ready to fall on paper at any moment I chose.

College came and I learned from brilliant, published professors on how to perfect my craft. They gave me the tools and encouragement I had needed to know that writing was not just a passion for me, but also a career path. Those were the only years I spent writing everyday and my writing reflected that practice but I didn’t connect the dots between practice and ease. When I practiced more, writing flowed with ease, when I didn’t, ideas remained stuck, bouncing around my skeleton.

After graduation, fear decided to take over my love for writing entirely. It stood behind me while my pencil scratched paper, it’s hot breathe leaving my neck damp, it’s presence reminding me that I could fail and that the stakes were very high.

“You have lost your talent.”

“You used to be good at this.”

“Remember how effortlessly this used to flow from you?”

“You will never amount to anything. You will never be published.”

It moaned.

I would finish a piece, exhausted, hating every word that struggled to get out of me. This continued for years. Once in awhile lightening would strike and I would run to my pages, falling to my knees and thanking the writing gods that an idea appeared and wanted to be set free. In the moment of writing, all else melted away. I called this, “blacking out.” I would go to a different place, one where I felt like I was floating down a river, connecting to the highest version of myself, our veins crisscrossing together to form a knot for those few minutes to hours that words kept stacking together in front of me. It was just me and the paper, an idea jumping into the notebook, it’s boots leaving wet footprints along the dotted lines.

These spurts were rare, they came every six months or so. The rest of the time when I sat down to write, I felt a creak in my arm, a tin man needing a spot of oil.

I let this stop me from playing. Writing was taken very seriously by my creative mind. It no longer was done for the joy or love of telling stories. If everyday wasn’t met with the most heart wrenching sentence, the most vivid detail, that writing session was a failure and a waste of my time, even if hundreds of words were written that day.

Fear of not becoming something grew. It stole the joy out of writing.

Waking in the night, choking on fear’s long black hair until it came out in wet strings, like a cat coughing up a hairball. It consumed me.

It wasn’t until last year that I learned my biggest lesson when it comes to creativity.

It doesn’t need to be painful, it shouldn’t suffocate beneath fear’s footprints. It needs space to breathe, to experience joy, to be playful, to tease and laugh, to be childlike again.

My writing didn’t need to be taken so damn seriously. It begged to goof off again in the back of the classroom, the teacher letting it slide this time as the idea was always trying to be so serious.

Social Media also put a weird block on my creativity and I still struggle with this. I figured if I was going to write something, it needed to be shared on my Instagram, for the world to see. It wasn’t until I read the book, Book in a Month, that I realized often our writing thrives the most when it stays with us. Our first drafts are so fragile—small glass stones in our hands— and when we share them before they are ready, they shatter, hiding beneath dressers only to get stuck in our wrinkled heels later. We have to guard these first drafts with our entire hearts. They are precious little newborns who need to be fed and burped every hour. Let them grow and change before throwing them under a spotlight.

This new mindset came from having a safe and creative space in my home, from having a partner who reminded me that I could, even when fear had me in tears on the couch, questioning myself until I turned blue.

The shift in perspective came from watching Master Class and hearing how Margaret Atwood had many first novel drafts that she threw away and one that she tried very hard to get published but no one took seriously. She didn’t let this stop her, she kept writing, she didn’t fear practice. She told me through my laptop screen in her deep red scarf that the only way to improve as a writer is to do just that, write and not when the iron was hot, but every day, even when ideas do not flow easily. Fear and practice were connected. You could not have one without the other.

The days that the writing is hard, when the ideas feel like cement, those days that I still sit down and write are the ones that are the most life changing. They are lessons. I walk away from my laptop and understand what didn’t go well in the process and what did. I used to think every time I sat down to write that I was about to start the next Great American Novel and now I know that when I sit to write, not every word needs to be drool worthy, highlighted, cut out and taped on walls. Sometimes knots need to be untangled and my morning writing session combs them out vigorously.

The idea of practice being needed by even the greats, the artists born with their talents in their mothers wombs came from the show, The Queens Gambit. When the series ended I was bawling my eyes out, wiping tears from my eyes, telling my partner that I finally understood, practice is the key, practice is what separates the good from the great.

In order to make practice a daily routine, I had to set a realistic goal for myself and never not show up for it. If I decided not to show up for my 30 minute- 6:30 am writing session, then I was actively choosing not to show up for that eight year old girl who wrote novels in her basement. The little girl who felt writing ignite a spark inside of her, a yellow glow warming her rib cage.

I used to think if I do not make a living off of my writing and publish at least one book, I will be a failure. And although I would be lying if I said that being a published author wasn’t still a dream of mine, I have accepted that I will still have a beautiful life if it does not happen for me. I can’t be writing for an ultimate, future goal, I need to be writing for myself, for my heart, for my now. I want to tell stories, I want to render beautiful details, rich characters, for myself, not for anyone else. And if I want to create better characters, more captivating scenes, I need to practice creating them, every single day.

This is all to say to anyone else out there battling fear, embrace practice, embrace play. I challenge you to fall back in love with your passion, to stop taking it so seriously. Fear still creeps in my windows every morning I sit down to write. I feel a deep resistance in my core, a small voice telling me that I am wasting my time and that what I am writing will never go anywhere, but I still type away for thirty minutes. About fifteen minutes in, fear gets bored and decides to leave me alone and that is when some of my best writing appears.

Bore fear by doing.

It only gets excitement and enjoyment when you give into it, when you listen to it. When you ignore it, it yawns, garlic breath leaking from it’s black mouth and it moves on to the next person.

I used to say writing is me, it flows in my veins, shaping my DNA into tiny pencils, but I don’t believe that anymore. To say that you are completely one thing is putting too much pressure on it. I say now that, “I am.” Plain and simple. I just am.

But even though I am, I still enjoy the heck out of writing, more than I enjoy most things.

And what I love even more than that is sharing that writing with others.

The quote on my wall, the eight year old in me couldn’t understand then, but the 28 year old version of me understands this now deeply.

“The meaning of life is to find your gift, the purpose of life is to give it away.”

-Pablo Picasso.

.