Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

Pool and life, pool and writing, it really does offer a lot of lessons/provide interesting parallels for me.

Thank you to some of my regulars here who said hello over there on my pool playing diary! It really is just me talking to myself in public, which I have done occasionally since childhood. Cell phones and ear buds made me look like less of a crazy person.

Anyway: this week’s chat there is relevant to my life over here in writing. The use of practice to improve performance. In pool the feedback is quick, you see the weakness, the shots you miss, you practice said shot until it becomes a gimme (far easier said than done!). You find a new technique to move the white, you study interaction of spin on the white, the object ball, the path taken after contact with cushions, and so on. You practice that until it become predictable. Sweet, a new skill.

Practicing writing novels is not quite the same. The feedback is a bit slower. For me, anyway, hahaha! But, to my mind, there is no doubt you need the practice, both at writing the whole beast out, and then wrangling it into shape, but also at the constituent parts. Some practice will take a long time, but other parts of the novel writing process can be broken down into identifiable skills, and practiced.

I think I probably need to find more effective ways to practice writing. I keep the muscle working on this blog, and now over there on my pool diary, I do some journaling, and of course I do my actual writing. I read and take notes from books about writing, I watch videos about it (less now than before – too much time can be wasted), and I read other books, fiction and non. That is quite a lot.

And yet. I think I need more focus in my writing practice, as I have in pool. Something where I can measure results. I have no idea what this is at present. Grammar exercises. Random scene creation to hit/incorporate 3 then 5 then 7 predetermined goals with fluidity and absence of obvious info dump.

I need to identify my weaknesses. Which means getting critiques, useful critiques, and working to eliminate the found errors. Ugh. I don’t shy from criticism, I welcome it, but knowing you have to do it awakens the inner angst ridden teenager in me, and he wasn’t the best at accepting advice, even when kindly meant. Raging hormones, raging insecurity possibly related to the raging hormones, it was quite a time.

So. I’m still writing my collage pieces for The Red Palace, and they’re beginning to converge, a whole image emerging from the fragments. I’m not quite ready to start putting bits together and filling in the missing parts, but it is less far away than I thought, and as I said last week, there will then be a fair chunk of linear writing to be done. I feel like David Bowie with his cut up lyrics, waiting to see what might emerge, as order and emphasis can still radically change. It is fun!

But I could use each collage creation as practice. I should. There is so much to learn in writing, it can be overwhelming. Finding your own voice is hard enough, but to then add technique, and perhaps discover that your voice is found through the very act of applying technique? That is hard. Aaaargh!- level hard.

Sometimes it is much easier to say, “I’m just writing a story, bub. To amuse myself and others. Hopefully.”

So what I’m practicing this week is mindfulness. I’m going to try to stay aware of my future reader of The Red Palace, and the journey they will go on through my forest of words, where they will start, what they will be curious about, which paths they may follow, and where they may end up. I’m not simply going to write this for me, or for my characters, or to make a point. I’m going to write it for you. The reader.

Next week I’ll work on some practice shit. Gah, that’s difficult!