The Third Try

"Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries."
- James Michener

So here we go again. Third verse same as the first.
All my life I’ve wanted to be a writer. It’s started when I was eight years old.

In second grade I decided to be a teacher (because I thought I was the smartest kid in the class and that was a good reason to become a teacher. Of course I was wrong on both accounts.) and I wrote my first story, “The Adventures of Risk Man.” He was a James Bond type adventure hero. I think he had a light saber too. That probably has been my most successful story to date; At least it had an ending. Ever since then I have had plenty of ideas but have seldom been able to finish anything. My biggest problem as a writer has been the problem of Perseverance.


My best writing teachers have been Natalie Goldberg, Julia Cameron, and, most recently, Heather Sellers. For those just trying to get started with the habit of writing, Sellers' book Page After Page can be a godsend. Natalie Goldberg can take you the rest of the way from there. In her book, Writing Down the Bones, she provides lots of sage advice on honing the craft of writing. Now I just need a good book on editing and publishing and I'm set.

The biggest lesson I received from Julia Cameron--and the other two wise women echo this--is perseverance. In a book titled "Art and Fear", the author explains that the 90% of crap that we write prepares us for the 10% that shines. The author relates a tale of a pottery class in which the class is split into two groups. The first group will be graded on the quality of one piece only. The second group will be graded solely on quantity. At the end of the semester the professor agrees to simply weigh the amount of clay that the latter group has produced. The result? The quality of the work in the second group far exceeded the first. Quantity IS the path to quality, at least in art. The artist is constantly learning and revising, so the artist who stays with it longer produces better stuff. The first group was so obsessed with perfection that they barely finished a single piece. Of course if both groups were allowed get grades for quantity and then choose one single piece to be graded on quality, it would be the best of both worlds. That, however, was not the case. Still that's something I'll remember next time I have a classroom.

I am thirty something years old. I have been teaching for the past 10 and writing for most of the past 20. This blog will record my learnings and observations on both. Like everything, it is a work in progress.

In one of her books, I forget which one, Julia Cameron explains that the most important thing that a writer can have is perseverance. The writer who sticks with his craft long enough, masters it. She defines success as some sort of personal measure in which the author achieves something that he deems accurately conveys his intended meaning. If only all jobs could be so self-defined. Heather Sellers relates in her book the story of a really bad writing student. She and her friends used to make fun of him in their college writing class because his fiction was so bad. They'd try to be nice but honestly they pitied him. About five years later, she and her friends were still writing, and teaching, getting married, having babies, going on diets and all the changes that life brings but they were still unpublished. The "loser" from their class? Well he stuck with it for those five years. And he kept getting better and better. And one day, five years after their class, Heather and her friends open up some literary magazine to read the review of the guys recently published book.

The moral of the story? Stick with it!

This is my third try. We'll see how far I get.

Goals:
1. Write everyday ( in this blog or elsewhere).
2. Develop the practice of revising and sticking WITH a story. (I have plenty of beginnings. I just need to finish something.)
3. Write what I know ( reflect on writing, teaching, coffee shops, video games, being Jewish, New York City, Zen Buddhism, chess, substitute teaching, basketball, living with my girlfriend, family, etc.)