gettin' it done. done. done.

David: shreddin'.

Practice makes perfect. If you want to play a piece of music, you practice and eventually, it will be perfect. My mother practices her knitting, my roommate practices making art, my brother is a sponsored long board racer, and he didn’t get there without practicing (or without an agreeable amount of stupidity and nasty road rash).

And if you want to be a good writer, you have to sit down at the computer and practice. Anne Lamott got me all ready to write more after I read Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. But she’s always talking about how you have to actually sit down and do it! You have to be willing to write what she calls “shitty first drafts” and how she knows authors who create beautiful pieces of literary genius, but none of them write good first drafts.

She says her friend sits down every morning and tells himself, “It’s not like you don’t have a choice, because you do- you can either type or kill yourself.”

So that’s encouraging.

I went to the Atlas the other day so I could sit down and write. I’ve been ignoring my blog, telling myself that I’ll post something soon, even though I knew I wouldn’t with all that goes on with college and…stuff. I ended up reading other people’s blogs, skyping Janae Rose (we watched a little of the sunrise in Thailand, as the sun was setting on my side of the planet), playing with a little spider that kept crawling across my keyboard, and talking to Kevin House about mushroom hunting.

Writing didn’t happen.

But yesterday!- my Uncle Dave was at my house and I was telling him how I want to write, need to write, but I’m not pushing myself and he goes, “I challenge you to a writing competition! Right now!”

We agreed to do just one paragraph each. We sat down; I typed furiously and referenced Anne Lamott and he scribbled in a notebook.

Me: shreddin' literary-style

We read our paragraphs out loud- his about the weather, mine was ironically about not writing. But hey- practice makes perfect, right? Right.