Practice Makes Perfect?
The night before I started piano lessons my brother, Jeremy, was working on a school art project revolving around Charlie Brown. He needed a recording of Vince Guaraldi’s Peanuts Theme Song by the end of the week. This was decades before YouTube, so he was hoping I’d be able to learn and perfect this piece in three days, just in time for him to tape me playing it with his GE cassette recorder. Seemed doable to me, so I readily agreed. I’m going to assume Jeremy knew better and was just teasing, but I legit thought I’d go to piano lessons and within a few months be a trained concert pianist. Boy, was I wrong.
The first lesson was learning just the basics—middle C, octaves, intervals—nothing even remotely close to sounding like a song. I came home deflated. How was I going to break the news to Jeremy that I would be reneging on my promise?
I was about 9 when my parents bought me an old upright piano and agreed to weekly lessons. Up to that point, most things I tried came pretty easy to me. I excelled at reading, buzzing through Dick and Jane books with ease and by that age I was able to follow a recipe well enough to bake brownies from scratch. I’m sure I assumed piano would be similar especially since my first grade teacher, Mrs. Cabrera, was also my piano teacher.
Piano didn’t come quite so naturally and just the desire to do well wasn’t quite enough. All I wanted to do was learn to play a song, but instead I found myself practicing scales and arpeggios and struggling to understand meter. I plugged away, even though practicing daily was a grind. My dad and my brother were not fans of my loud and uninspired banging, but my mom continued to encourage.
Eventually I became a passable player. Not good, mind you, but passable. While I was technically proficient, I struggled to emotionally connect with the music. Maybe more hours of practice would have made me less mechanical, but I don’t think music works that way. Actually, I believe Jeremy still has occasional nightmares of my graceless rendition of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Music of the Night” from Phantom of the Opera. It was my favorite piece to play at forte early Saturday mornings after I knew he had a late Friday night.
Practice is essential to being a good musician, hours upon hours of practice to be precise, but I wasn’t able to let my guard down enough to emotionally connect with the music or an audience. Maybe I could have perfected a piece, but minor imperfections, or interpretations, are the heart and soul of a great performance. And that personal touch, revealing a bit of myself to the world, was not something I was willing or able to do.
As I’m working on my writing skills, I find myself in this familiar territory. I’m practicing and practicing, but struggling with certain pieces.
This past week, I spent about 30 hours working on a storyboard for a video project with BrandFlick. I’m still essentially apprenticing under David’s watchful eye, but this was the first piece I attempted all on my own. I spent hours writing and rewriting, using similar pieces of his work as a template, pouring over my notes and researching our client online. I wanted to finish this work before we headed out for fall break in Florida. I wanted to impress David and in turn our client.
I didn’t accomplish any of my goals. Well, I’m pretty sure my writing was grammatically correct, but otherwise I completely missed the mark. Much like my rendition of Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” my writing was missing heart, soul and any compelling reason to connect with the story.
Thankfully, we have a little time before our deadline so I’ll be able to regroup and try again, starting from scratch. After some encouraging words from David (“use your words, not mine”) and spending the last two days reflecting, I realize the reason I’ve been struggling is I spent so much time worrying what everyone would think of my writing that I didn’t focus on the goal at hand. I didn’t focus on telling the story. And more importantly, I didn’t use my words or my impression of the story as I saw it through interviews and research—once again afraid to reveal myself. But now that I see my mistake, I’m ready to give it another try. I needed something to occupy my time on the plane anyway.
Time put into something does not necessarily translate to perfection. I’m doing a post every day this month for Blogtober, but that doesn’t mean I’m getting better as a blogger. I’ve been working on several pieces that I know will ruffle some feathers and likely bring some pushback, so I’ve been fearful of sharing to this point. I now realize the only way to improve my writing is to push my limits through open, honest and raw discussion of my feelings and opinions. Leaving everything on the page is scary, but also imperative to growing as a writer and a person.
As I push beyond superficial fluff into attempting to understand my core beliefs and values through my writing, I hope you’ll be kind and open to discussion rather than judgmental. Afterall, this is practice, not perfection.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I took piano lessons for seven long years and I never did learn to play the Peanuts Theme Song.
