What are you trying to get better at? What are the stakes you’ll have when you’re good and how can you lower those stakes now?
I got good at writing by lowering the stakes.
If I had sat down at my computer and said, “I’m going to write an essay to get published in The New Yorker,” I never would have been able begin – let alone complete – anything significant.
Instead, I wrote daily here.
Then, I wrote weekly for my local paper. Unpaid, but in print. Some years I write as many as fifty articles for the paper.
So when it happened that I was invited to write a chapter for a book, I had practiced enough that it felt attainable.
And when I embarked on my first book project, I trusted my ability to write clear sentences enough that it never felt so overwhelming that I couldn’t write.
Alice Parker told me the same thing about her composing career. After years of arranging but not composing after she graduated with a composition degree, her first commission was to write an anthem for a children’s choir. This, she felt, was low enough stakes to accept.
This is so natural for young people – as children, almost everything we start has low stakes – but foreign for adults, who want to leap directly into the high-stakes deep end. Slow down! Lower the stakes!