I'll Learn the Scales at the Audition

On Practice and Being Bad at Things

Oct 22, 2024

Hey friends,

I played the flute in middle and high school. I loved it and think often of picking it up again. I think now that I understand the importance of being bad while you practice, I would get a lot more out of it. I also want my kid to take up an instrument (maybe something other than the drums, chosen only to annoy me) and I feel myself rehearsing all the things I’d tell them about practice that I didn’t know when I was their age. If my mom had told me those things, I wouldn’t have listened. But I’m sure I’ll tell my kid, and they too won’t listen. So I’ll tell you, and maybe you’ll find it useful.

I remember being at an audition held at a small college in Hickory, NC. I was in 8th or 9th grade, and the audition was for an All-County Band group, I think. I had to play a prepared solo, sightread a piece I’d never seen before, and play a scale on demand—one of many I was supposed to have memorized. I nailed my solo, and not much else.

Because you know what sucks to practice when you’re 12 and 13 (or probably any age)? Scales. I knew the big ones. C, B flat, D, E flat, F, G. I could go three octaves on some. But there were others I just never learned. D flat, F sharp, C sharp—anything with more than five flats or sharps never stuck in my brain. Or, I never practiced them enough because I didn’t need to, except at these once or twice a year auditions. I didn’t take private lessons, so there wasn’t anyone there to tsk tsk at me. I could play all our music in class just fine, even if knowing some of those scales would have made the ever-present flute runs easier. I managed. I winged it. It worked pretty much all the time, thus I never felt like I needed to change my approach.

On the bus there, I studied some scales and practiced the fingerings on a pencil, as if that would help. I’ll figure it out when I get there, I thought. I’d have several hours before my number was called. That’ll be plenty of time to learn a few scales, I thought. In theory, this is correct. But in practice, it’s not practice. I remember being in the hallways of this small college, frantically playing scales, worrying because they weren’t sticking, getting nervous about the performance on top of not knowing that damn scales. I remember regretting that I hasn’t practiced more before.

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Some people can learn things under this kind of pressure. Some (say they) thrive on it. I don’t remember what scale they asked me to play. I might have gotten lucky that what the judges asked me to play happened to be one I remembered from my cram sessions, but either way I didn’t play the scale flawlessly or with ease. I just proved I had good short term recall.

I did this more than once. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. I didn’t learn anything from it, either—both in the sense of committing scales to memory or changing future behavior because of past adverse experiences. I thought I was bad at scales. And I was! But now I know, 30 years later, that I was bad at practicing and bad at being bad. I was bad at scales because I didn’t practice them because they were boring and they didn’t come naturally to me. It was boring to practice scales because I was a child and of course that stuff is boring. I was uncomfortable with doing things I was bad at also because I was a child who was “good at” music and didn’t understand that the more you did the things you were bad at, the better you would get at them. People probably told me this, but of course I didn’t listen.

I am an adult now, and it still sucks to do boring things. I think often of taking music lessons again and I imagine now I would be better at practicing scales. I’d know why I need to know them and how they could help me. A real eating your vegetables situation. I’m sure I would still be bored, but some things in life are just boring and always will be. And that’s ok. The biggest difference would be that now I am less afraid of being bad at it. So I’m bad at scales. So what? It helps that I’m not being judged on it but even still, I’m just much more comfortable with being bad at things now than I was a teenager. Shocking, I know.

What does this have to do with writing? It’s ok to be bad at it at times, even beyond your first manuscript. Your rough drafts are always going to be rough, and you have to stop yourself from thinking if I had only done this right the first time, I wouldn’t spend so much time editing!!! Editing is practicing scales. Not editing is winging it at the audition. The boring stuff will probably never stop being boring. You’ll just care less about it being boring. You have to do the boring stuff because not everything is solos. Some things are scales and sightreading. All together, the boring stuff and fun stuff are the practice that makes art. You have to do all of it to get better.

If you are early in your writing career or practice, regardless of how old you are, I hope you can remember this advice. It’s ok to be bad at things. You’re not going to get it right the first time. Art takes work. It’s ok if you can’t remember it, though, because I couldn’t either at the beginning. If you can manage to remember it a little earlier than I did, you’ll be ahead of the game.

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I'll Learn the Scales at the Audition

On Practice and Being Bad at Things

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