Lucky, this point in time and space

I realized recently that one of the things I miss most about my music student days is practicing. I submit this thought with the note that there is a difference between a practice session and practicing, by which I mean the regularity, the constant, everyday routine. I never particularly enjoyed it when I was younger, but eventually I grew to appreciate the fixed quality of it. And I have a very different perspective on practicing now that I am trying to get into the same sort of routine with my writing.

I miss knowing exactly what I needed to work on every day. The list of pieces, excerpts, etudes, scales, tuning. And I miss knowing how to fix problems. There came a point during college when I realized I actually knew how to solve a lot of things without asking for help; even if I didn't, I had a lot of ideas to try. And the most valuable thing I learned from Eric when I was his student was how to practice efficiently. By the last two years or so I almost always came in with a plan, and I knew to chuck something if it wasn't working.

Writing is so much harder because I haven't reached that point yet. So often I think I know what I'm going to do and I get stuck without any idea what to try next. I often sense that there's a problem but I don't know exactly what it is, how to isolate it. Other times I realize I really don't have any idea what I need to do during the course of a given hour, other than put out x amount of words. And efficiency? I honestly have no idea what that even means yet, in the context of trying to write a novel.

I miss, too, the mindlessness of practicing. I don't mean that practicing is really mindless, but so much of the daily routine was exactly that - routine. Warmups, scales, the same tricky passages over and over and over again, broken down into bar by bar or even beat by beat. New material to learn was usually the exciting exception to a given day's work, and with that repetition quickly became old. Horn is physically taxing at times; music is mentally taxing much of the time, but practicing is usually pleasantly predictable.

Nothing in writing feels routine to me yet. Every day I need to create new material out of nothing or rework old material until it feels new again. If I'm struggling with a sentence I can't just write it over and over and over again. I'm wrestling with nothing but myself, not the horn or Strauss or the tuner, and it often makes me feel like banging my head against the table.

I also miss the trust in repetition and time. Eventually, after years playing horn, I learned that given enough time and work, I really would get better, and I came to the point where I really believed it because it was a tried and true notion. It's how I mastered triple tonguing and polyphonics and high horn. Knowing that freed me from the self-loathing I used to engage in if I was struggling with something. If I had a crappy practice session or even a bad performance, it got so much easier to put it aside and trust that the next day would be better. It got so much easier to condense the focus to the moments when the horn was actually out of the case and not spend time beating myself up when it was not.

I am nowhere near that point with my writing yet. In some way I believe that it is possible to get there, but it seems so far away.

Maybe what I really miss about practicing is having a relative confidence that I was good, that I did in fact know what I was doing when I sat down and got to work. I hold out hope that an M.F.A program can provide me with the structure and support to get there by the time I graduate. If I had not learned from Eric and my older, wiser peers how to approach problems how to think about the act of practicing and playing horn, I wouldn't have gotten so much better. That's what I want, more than anything, from an M.F.A. program. I want to write the way I used to practice.