Name: practice
Uploaded: 2020-04-23T03:31:24.000Z
Duration: 3 min 51 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past simple

You know, it's been years, several of them, actually, Since I turned on this camera without knowing what I was gonna talk about, maybe we'll talk about that.

So when I was starting out as a writer, someone told me that when Ray Bradbury was asked how to write a good short story, he said, Right one short story every week for a year because nobody can write 52 bad short stories.

One having now been asked that question a lot, I suspect that what Ray Bradbury was trying to do was not so much offer good advice as make the question go away in a clever and gentle manner and also to lots of people can write 52 bad short stories in a row.

I mean, I could as anybody who's read my Zombie Corn apocalypse stories can attest.

But the thing that's true about Bradbury's advice is that you have to practice now.

Practice is one of those English words with like 52 different meanings, some of which contradict each other, like in a sports context practices what you do to prepare for the real thing.

But in other contexts, practice is the real thing, as when you practice medicine or practice the dark arts.

Or, I guess, in the case of Madam Pomfrey, potentially sometimes both.

So I was very fortunate to begin my writing career as a book reviewer, writing 175 word book reviews for Booklist magazine.

This forced me to read a lot, but also to read really broadly picture books in young adult novels and romance novels set in Scottish castles and Islamic history and books about boxing and poetry.

And, yes, also many books about conjoined twins.

The after mention context not just practice reading but also reading with an eye toward what kind of experience the book offered and to whom I might recommend it and revealing also forced me to practise writing in 175 word units.

And by practicing that form over and over again, I learned how to insert a bit of nuance into plot summary or which detail or quotation to choose.

I also developed a weird internal clock for knowing what 175 words feels like.

Like I know it's been about 100 75 words since I said Madam Pomfrey, which is in no way useful.

But the other stuff has been very useful because while writing a book review is very different from writing a novel, I already had a lot of practice that thinking about what stories conduce Oh, and how they do it and reviewing also brought a lot of structure and discipline to my life.

It taught me that I had to make writing a practice if I wanted to be good at it.

I should say I'm not like a naturally disciplined organized person as best expressed by my car, which is extremely messy, like my dear friend.

Hassan once commented that every time he walks up to the passenger side of my car, he expects to see a rat sitting in the passenger seat holding a little handbag, saying, Where we going today?

Lind and I love to procrastinate, but I have also learned to love practice because it works.

Like in the early days of reviewing books, I often finished a book with no idea of what I wanted to say about it.

In the early days of making Blood Brothers videos, I often ran up against deadlines because I didn't have ideas for videos.

But over years of practice, that starts to change.

Like people often ask me if I ever run out of ideas for blood.

But there's videos, and I suppose that I do.

But by making this a consistent practice for over 13 years now, in the same way my brain just kind of knows what 175 words looks like.

My brain just kind of knows that starting Saturday, if it doesn't have an idea, it needs to find one.

And so my brain starts working on it, thinking about what I'm wearing this week, what's been bothering me, where I'm finding hope.

If I'm finding it, maybe it's time for a silly video.

Maybe I shouldn't script one, and it keeps working until I've had an idea and after so many years, I almost always have one by Monday night.

So for me, making things doesn't lead to me using up all my ideas.

The practice of finding and expressing thought leads to more thoughts, so whether I'm editing a video, we're recording a podcast for writing a novel.

What I'm really doing and what I really love is practicing.