Making a Leg

While almost anyone can puff up his chest and call himself a writer, developing writing mastery takes as many hours of practice as it takes to become a ballerina. In ballet, it takes many years of training to be able to extend one’s leg in a perfect line that appears to stretch to infinity.  It’s called making a leg. Developing correct muscle formation in the feet and legs takes years of practice. No one ever thinks it will happen overnight. And no one ever says: “You’ve made a leg.”  The thing speaks for itself.

With writing, though, just scrawling a line or two constitutes the work of a writer.  People who have written a few articles, blogs, blurbs, and one poorly crafted book fancy themselves as masters.  In writing, there is no objective standard that speaks for itself like making a leg. Even being a best-selling author does not mean you’re a master.  It could mean that you were in the right place at the right time with the right concept and just got lucky.  Not so with ballet. Making a leg is never a matter of luck. Think of the exquisite prima ballerinas who enter the studio with the intention of only working on the most rudimentary ballet step—their tendus.

Writing is something we all learn in school, but making a leg as a writer is an entirely different place to explore. And here’s the trick. If you embrace the concept of consistently doing hard work as a discipline, you come to understand that just dashing off a blog or a post is writing per se, but it isn’t real writing; it’s just the beginning, a practice session focusing on one’s commas as if they were tendus. While you might be on the road to mastery, it is still elusive and always slightly out of reach. You have miles to go before you can call yourself a master.

Learning to practice steps in ballet is only the first phase of making a leg.  There is exacting attention paid to the details of all of the parts of your body working together. The mastery of writing requires the same process of paying close attention to small details. You know you are a writer when you fall in love with the art of making changes so subtle that only you, yourself, can see them. Every master writer incessantly tweaks the small details that ultimately fine-tune and define the entire body of a work. 

If you want to make a leg as a writer, then every day you must write anything: blogs, posts, poems, tweets, articles, essays, books, scripts and plays.  You must write for other people as a professional writer and you must write for yourself—your own stories. And if you’re not actually writing then you must be thinking of it. You must be jotting notes in your head, on the backs of store receipts, and if need be, even on the back of your hand.

You must never be completely finished with any work even after you have deemed it to be done and you have washed your hands of it.  Next time when you go back and read it again, you will see one small thing you will want to change. Even if you only want to add a different word or a comma, you will want to make it slightly better.  You must never be completely satisfied with anything you’ve written, and this, ironically, will give you great joy and the right to call yourself a master.