If you look in this week's issue, you will see a sadly wrecked car. Alas, it is no more: it has come to rest in the greenery, mourned by humans and used as a perch by the farm cats. It will stay there until the resident mechanic has mined it for parts. (The car is an organ donor.)

But what of the driver? He's fine, really. He's recovered from his injuries and is now learning to play footie. But he's probably chuckling over the fact that every adult in his acquaintance gave him the same advice, almost in chorus. Sure, you had an accident. Happens to all of us, particularly when we're new drivers. But the most important thing to do is… Get back on the horse. Go out and drive the very next day. Don't let it get to you. And that advice – which was also given to me after my first car accident, is really important. And not just for drivers.

The reason they tell you to 'get back on the horse' is that you might worry so much about making a mistake again that you become afraid to drive – which, in the United States of America, is a near-fatal condition. Also, you might lose those newly-acquired driving skills if you don't practice. So you shrug it off, say a prayer, and get back behind the wheel.

Now, how does that apply to writing?

Suppose you entered a writing or poetry contest, and didn't even place. Or you self-published a book, and nobody seemed very interested in what you'd written. Or your online column or article went uncommented for a long time. The first thing to say about this is: so what? Did you get something out of writing the story, poem, book, or article? Then chalk it up to practice. No need to worry about it. Those people who bemoan every rejection slip or kill fee they ever got are obsessing about the wrong thing. They need to get back on the horse.

Not everything you write will be a 'success', if you're measuring success by fame, fortune, or accolades. But everything you write will be a success if it makes you better at what you do.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?, goes the ancient joke. Practice.

You should write just about every day. Everyone says that, and everyone is right. You need to develop the habit of putting your ideas together, and work on ways to communicate more effectively. You need to be self-critical – try this out on yourself before you subject an audience to it. Here's what Ben Franklin had to say about how he taught himself to be a writer:

About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator¹. It was the third. I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try'd to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them. But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in recollecting and using them, which I thought I should have acquired before that time if I had gone on making verses; since the continual occasion for words of the same import, but of different length, to suit the measure, or of different sound for the rhyme, would have laid me under a constant necessity of searching for variety, and also have tended to fix that variety in my mind, and make me master of it. Therefore I took some of the tales and turned them into verse; and, after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again. I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method of the language, and this encouraged me to think I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitious.

Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography

Why was Franklin doing this? Surely he had teachers for that? Er, no. Franklin was the youngest son out of 17 children. His dad was a great guy, according to Franklin, but back then, education cost real money. So Franklin had to become an autodidact, and he did – so much so that the French later regarded this poor boy from Boston as one of the great minds of his generation, a true philosophe. Now, when the French say that about you, you've really made it, right, Michael Moore?

Franklin's writings were influential: think about it. As the editor of the Pennsylvania Gazette, he did a lot to lay the groundwork for one of the greatest experiments in government of all time². Franklin not a writer? It's unthinkable, just as it's unimaginable that Franklin wouldn't become a scientist. We might not have had the internet if he hadn't electrified those turkeys. So we're really grateful he stuck with his writing practice.

'Oh,' you say, 'but I don't have time. I'm so busy: I've got choir practice and…'

My time for these exercises and for reading was at night, after work or before it began in the morning, or on Sundays, when I contrived to be in the printing-house alone, evading as much as I could the common attendance on public worship which my father used to exact of me when I was under his care, and which indeed I still thought a duty, though I could not, as it seemed to me, afford time to practise it.

Franklin, same paragraph

Okay, we won't go so far as to say 'skip church to practice writing'. At least, not while the pastor is looking. But you see how seriously Franklin took his self-education. In the next paragraph he tells us that he talked his brother into letting him design his own diet (yes, he was an early nutritional nut), and used the dinner hour break to get in more study while the others were stuffing their faces and getting sleepy. Name a teenager who approaches education like that today – and I'll predict a future world leader, or at least a young person I'd enjoy talking to.

Which gets me back to getting back on the horse. Franklin had a little bit of instruction as a kid, but then he had to go and work as a printer's apprentice to his big brother. He could have given up at this point and resigned himself to setting type forever. He wanted to go to sea, but his dad was too worried about his safety. He could have given up studying the sea, but guess what you find when you look up 'Who first charted the Gulf Stream?' No, you don't get three guesses. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA, get it?) is very proud of our Founding Scientist.

When Franklin was fooled by an insincere glad-handing politician into taking a ship for London, only to find out the governor didn't intend to use his contacts to set him up with a printing press like he said he would, he didn't quit. He got back on the horse by going to work in a London print shop, Palmer's in Bartholomew Close. He lived in London for eighteen months. He read all the books he could get his hands on. He published a pamphlet and letters to the editor. (Yep, the Times and such.) When he had saved enough money for a ticket, he went back to Philadelphia, kept working, and eventually started his own paper.

Franklin's habit of getting back on the horse is an object lesson for us all – as is the persistence of the young man who will forever have a rueful memory of that red car. We live and learn. We accumulate trails of paper and/or pixels as we write our way through this life. It's not whether the individual effort earned kudos – it might not even be important that they ever do. What's important is what we get out of the experience: we learn, we move on. And we keep practicing.

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

12.09.16 Front Page

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