Doing Scales

For Christmas my older sister gave me the book “Bird by Bird” by Anne Lamott. I flipped through the pages and commented,

“Huh, I haven’t read this one.”

“What?” she exclaimed in surprise, and I suddenly felt like a kid admitting I didn’t actually know what any of the cool kids were talking about.

“Oh,” said my sister, leaning in a little closer “It’s really a good one.”

And she was right. I started reading “Bird by Bird” shortly after we returned home from the Midwest, where we spent a happy but chaotic five days visiting my rather massive family. After settling back into our Pacific Northwest home, I picked up my new book and began devouring. By the end of the Introduction, I had tears in my eyes. I told my husband I would be adding the title to my curriculum on becoming a better writer this year. That’s the plan you know, to scribble, and read, and send out, and try and then by the end of the summer hopefully have improved this craft that would ideally be my next career.

In any case, in “Bird by Bird”, Anne talks openly about her father who was also a writer. She describes how she longed for a dad who went to the office and did a “normal” job. I sat there reading thinking the exact opposite, trying to imagine what life would have been like if my father, who is a bit of a genius was a writer instead of a teacher of nuclear power. My dad used to illustrate how everything was made up of atoms and if harnessed, the power of those atoms could power whole cities. I still remember being sick in bed, and trying to follow his words as he sat on the edge of my bed explaining how nuclear power worked to my seven-year-old self. I still don’t fully understand the whole concept, but I’m forever grateful that he took the time to explain high concepts, even when I was a kid.

Anne knew she wanted to be a writer at an early age, and she shared that dream with her dad, who would give her advice and lead by example. In the introduction she quotes one of her father’s pieces of advice on writing. I highlighted the passage as soon as I read it.

“Do it every day for a while. Do it as you would do scales on the piano. Do it by prearrangement with yourself. Do it as a debt of honor. And make a commitment to finishing things.”

I never took piano lessons, but I was in ballet for the better part of a decade, and the number of piles I did at the barre could probably be counted in the thousands. So, I’m going to think of this blog as my own barre, and it’s my goal to sit down and do my piles every day. I know some days will be dull, and the words will bundle together in my brain and not come out at all how I wanted them to, but that’s how you get better. You do the piles, even if your knees crack, and your turn out isn’t great. You keep going. Cheers for putting in the work.

-HR