On Writing: Leveling Up

Week 5 of my 6-week blogging rotation is a post on how to write.

I've spent the last week wanting to tell you an important concept but having a hard time coming up with a good analogy.

Here's the idea: you want to be an excellent writer, polished and wise and amazing. I mean, your head is full of deep insights, interconnected information, and incredible stories, all swimming in a sea of words and images. You have experience to share, and you see things that others don't. You want to put it out there and hear a collective gasp because it is just that amazing.

As Elizabeth Bennet said to Mr. Darcy, "We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb."

Here's the truth: you can't leap from here to there in a single bound.

We all want to be like the young janitor in Good Will Hunting who solved graduate-level math problems without actually going to college because he was just that brilliant.

Or like the poor girl who can't afford figure-skating lessons, but when she finally laces a pair of skates on her feet, she shows such a natural ability that she blows past all the rich girls who have been taking lessons for years and wins the competition. I think that was in a story one of my daughters used to love.

Emily Dickinson wrote in private and didn't publish much of anything, but then the world was amazed after her death.

Most of us are not Emily Dickinson. 

We are just us.

We have to take all the prerequisites before we can take the upper-level math classes.

We have to start writing and we have to let people see it, even though we know that someday we're going to be embarrassed at these early efforts. We have to accept feedback in order to improve. 

We can't get to "expert" without first being "beginner."

I had heard the phrase "level up" in regards to video games, so I asked Paul's cousin Darrell's son Tristan in a WhatsApp message if it worked to compare writing to gaming, that you had to pass through level one to get to level two, and so on.

DISCLAIMER: this is not a blanket endorsement of video games, so if you are 12 years old and your mom doesn't let you play anything beyond Tetris, don't go telling her that I endorse Minecraft. This is a comparison. That is all. 

Let's just say Tristan is a patient teacher and I learned a lot. He said:

It's actually less of an analogy and more of a direct parallel. Games where your characters level up are usually RPGs, role-playing games. The way you level up in those games is by collecting EXP or experience points. By doing the same thing over and over you gain EXP and eventually level up and your stats go up, or you learn a new skill or something.

Even some non RPG games work like this where your characters will get better in certain aspects by repeating the related activities.

While it's certainly true that certain classes have different strengths and weaknesses and natural inclinations, they're not always fixed. A fighter may naturally have higher strength stat growth, if you invest on say their intelligence or wisdom stat you could still have them learn skills or change classes.

"Three Cats on a Porch Rail" [a pseudonym] is a perfect example of this. Each character has certain skills that they're naturally gifted at, but you can choose for them to pursue whatever ones you want them to. And sometimes if you pour enough time and effort into a certain skills they may discover a hidden talent in that area.

Look at the parallels to writing--"By doing the same thing over and over you gain experience and eventually level up. . . or you learn a new skill or something." And if you pour time and effort into certain skills you can discover a hidden talent!

Tristan goes on:

"Honestly it's pretty much like real life. The only way to get better at something is practice. Some people may have natural giftings in certain areas, but even without that work and perseverance can surpass that. I guess to simplify to get to level 10 you have to achieve all the levels 1-9 first. And to do that you gotta repeat stuff a lot. There's literally a term for repeating something over and over either to gain experience or a bunch of items or whatever. It's called grinding. Level grinding, material grinding, skill grinding etc ."

Well. To get to level 10 you have to achieve all the levels 1-9 first. Keep that in mind, all you hopeful writers.

Don't be afraid to start at level 1. Once you're at 5 or 10, you'll look back and think level 1 looks easy and a bit silly. That's right and good.

DON'T TRY TO SKIP LEVEL ONE! OR TWO! OR THREE!

Your natural talents may make some steps shorter or faster. But still, you're supposed to look back someday and find all kinds of flaws in your early writing. That's how it works.

It's why I almost never go back and read my own books or old blog posts. I kind of choke at some things--word choices, subject matter, conclusions, my thought process, all kinds of things.

But now it's 20 years later and I think I can safely say I've leveled up a few times.

That is how it works.

But I couldn't get from there to here without going from then to now. If I would have waited until now to start writing, I would most likely write like I did back then and not like I write now. I might have an equal amount of life experience but not equal hours of putting that experience into words.

So make peace with putting words on paper and letting people see your floundering process. You have a story to tell, and that is how you learn to tell it. Dive in. Start telling it in your imperfect beginner way.

You won't ever amaze the whole room if you don't start now, right where you are, and start shaping your story into words.