Over the past four decades, I have made several attempts to play guitar. My degree of success is mixed, at best. If it hadn’t, I’d say I learned to play guitar. Over the past twenty years, I’ve made a couple of attempts to learn the piano as well.
My failure does not come from a general inability to play a musical instrument. I’ve played the clarinet for over forty years. Despite the occasional break, I can pick it up with little to no problem. About a decade ago, I set out to add flute to the instruments I could play. My progress was pretty good. I started with a student flute, and when, four years later, I upgraded, my teacher said I shouldn’t have waited. I had genuinely outgrown the instrument. I have an Akai EWI. While I won’t say I can play it, I do alright when I pull it out and fool around.
I do not doubt if I added saxophone, oboe, or bassoon progress would be closer to the flute than guitar or piano have been.
So why can I play those wind instruments but struggle with guitar? I think the abilities with wind instruments make guitar and piano more difficult to a lesser degree.
The embouchure, mouth shape, and motions differ among the wind instruments. The finger usage does not. Yes, clarinet and flute have different fingerings. The clarinet has more keys, a register key instead of an octave key. The embouchure is different enough that I am a rare bird who is a duel clarinetist and flutist.
Yet, comparing clarinet, flute, and guitar, the first two are effectively the same instrument. How you move your mouth and where you place your fingers differ, but learning mouth shaping based on register and expression, using a combination of all your fingers to make one note, and controlling volume and expression with breath are the core skills. Learning flute was learning a variation on the skills I had already developed.
In contrast, the guitar uses the hands only, so no mouth or breath skills are transferable; instead of using fingers as a team to form one note, only the fingers of the left-hand form notes. Those fingers can sound up to six notes. The fingers of the right hand are used to keynotes or mute notes either directly or my holding a pick. The palm of the right hand also mutes strings.
The result is my mind thinks I should have a lot of transferable skills because I’m doing the same thing, playing a musical instrument, when pretty much all the physical skills are different. Yes, other skills such as reading music, my ear for intervals and notes, and other mental skills all transfer.
But the non-transferable physical ones lead to frustration and a sense of slower progress.
I think I have a similar struggle writing fiction. I have written a lot. I got into blogging early with LiveJournal, although posts to the Boston Netgoth mailing list before were similar to blog posts. After LiveJournal, I have had personal blogs on Blogspot and self-hosted before coming to Medium.
In a genuine sense, I am an experienced writer. My working vocabulary is above average. I know how to write complete sentences. Grouping those sentences into functional paragraphs is not complex. Organizing paragraphs into an essay form is internalized.
All I need to learn is some story structure. Then I can start knocking out fiction.
That is not the case.
Instead, I struggle to write characters and convincing dialog. My first published short story got structure from a very skeletal outline of a nineteenth-century ghost story I fleshed out with my idea. I still lean heavily on Lester Dent’s Master Plot Formula for my short stories.
You could say I’m finding out all my mouth and breathwork to create solid paragraphs and essays is irrelevant to writing fiction. All the sentences and grammar are learning to work independently, the former generating plot and character, the notes of story, while the latter strums the strings to sound the notes.
Is writing fiction doing better than guitar?
Depending on how you count, this is somewhere between my 5th and 9th attempt to learn the art of fiction writing you could say it isn’t.
Yet, I think it is. Writing fiction is all mental skills except touch typing, which does translate. It creates less frustration in the moment of practice than playing guitar. Also, mistakes in writing fiction are more easily discerned after you’ve written. On guitar, they attack you as you make them.
There is the same amount of frustration overall, but lousy fiction writing doesn’t stop me at the moment the way bad guitar playing does. That has made it easier to establish a writing habit. Having the writing habit means I’m better at practicing the craft of writing.
Stephen King likes to say that the first million words make you a writer. Writing a million words is a lot easier if you aren’t so frustrated you put down the keyboard after writing a mere fifty.