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For heaven's sake, Albert, can't you count?

A pianist, to Albert Einstein, who was playing the violin at the time.

We're all good at different things. My late father was a superb civil engineer. He designed bridges, and tall buildings, and stadia. He was meticulous in his work. He once dragged all of us kids out to Clairton on a Sunday to see one of his projects. After an hour's drive on a grey day, we stood before what to us was a bewildering scaffolding of steel girders. Hardly inspiring.

'There!' he beamed. 'Isn't that beautiful?' We nodded politely. I was privately wishing that we'd driven in a different direction, so that we could better have enjoyed the fields, mountains, and rivers of our local area. (North was the greener direction, away from the steel mills.) My dad was right, of course: his structure was beautiful. We just didn't have the expertise to see it.

On the other hand, I could happily spend hours at a time trying to get the fingering right on a musical composition. (My mom once begged to me to 'play something else'.) Music takes work. Happy work, for me. Not for my dad, though. Throughout my teenage years, he'd come through the room where I was noodling with a guitar (one of my sisters probably had the piano occupied) and ask me for the instrument. I'd hand it over and sit back with a smile. I knew what would happen next. Dad would play and sing 'Old Dan Tucker'. He did this well, with a proper 1930s Southern style.

Old Dan Tucker came to town

Ridin' a billygoat, leadin' a hound….

He'd hand the guitar back and move on, probably to apply higher maths and a spirit level to the task of hanging another shelf for my mother. When he retired, he built a carport for his house – out of structural steel, which he designed and commissioned from his old firm. That carport is one of the modern wonders of the world. I suspect it will still be standing when the house it's attached to is consigned to the ash heap of history.

He never learned another song on the guitar. He was totally content with that one.

Years later, for a joke, my sisters and I, now grown, bought my dad a harmonica, complete with instruction book and demo tape. He listened and blew merrily for about half an hour, and then set it aside.

'You have to practice this thing,' he complained. The three of us looked at each other and burst out laughing.

Yes, children and moms and dads, if you want to improve at something, you need to practise.

That doesn't only apply to musical instruments, you know. Or painting. Or ice skating. Or riding your motorbike across country. You see where I'm going.

If you think your writing is already perfect, well, okay. But the best writers – the ones you remember, the ones you enjoy reading? – never thought that. They kept working, learning new things, improving. When you asked them what their best piece of writing was, they'd say, if they were honest, 'The one I haven't written yet.'

Thinking one has nothing to improve on is the hallmark of the happy amateur who is doing an activity for social reasons. They don't want to interfere with their own pleasure in their hobby by taking the activity seriously enough to work at it. After all, it's the pleasant glow you get when you've finished that paragraph that counts, right? Or the excuse writing gives you for collecting literary coffee mugs or t-shirts with clever sayings. Or having something to waste all your time with in November. Or the friends you make in the writing group.

That's fine, as far as it goes, but they may go around trying to bully other people into delivering unearned compliments. This is the Florence Foster Jenkins/Hyacinth Bucket approach: 'only the crème de la crème truly appreciate me. That's why only they get invited to my candlelight suppers…'

You know what? That's fine, too. You pays your money and you takes your choice, as Miss Lindquist used to say. Just let the rest of us get on with it and worry about whether our characters are shallow, or our adjectives too few or too many, or our punctuation such that a human being might be able to understand what we're nattering on about. We might actually want to write something better than we have before, ere we leave this planet. We might care that someone, somewhere, might benefit from our words. It might not be all about the mouseclicks or comments. It might be that we're doing it for the love of the thing itself. It might be that this isn't a competitive exercise at all.

May I leave you with something I, personally, find inspirational when I think of art, any art, and the way it communicates? See if you don't agree.

Do that? Are you kidding? I've got two left feet. Besides, that takes practice.

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

28.01.19 Front Page

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