I have been watching the great violinist Hilary Hahn’s #100daysofpractice clips on Instagram. Somehow, I’d missed them before now — although I’d known about Jenn Ashworth’s #100daysofwriting.
In each of her short videos, Hilary Hahn is working on a score she is learning or readying for performance. Often it’s a single phrase or passage she repeats again and again; at other times, she seems to be trying to get into the right headspace.
She explains what she’s doing, and why. But part of the joy of the series is seeing her find out a different why, and then a different one again.
The #100daysofpractice have made me wonder just how much of the writing I do, especially in notebooks, is practice in the Hilary Hahn sense, which is close to the French sense of les répétitions.
It’s doing something to get gradually better at doing it, rather than immediately to be doing it as well as it can be done.
For this morning’s Starting to Write workshop, I devised some warm-up exercises that are — I hope — an equivalent of a violinist’s scales. They are intended to stretch and extend your vocabulary (your muscles) — so that, hopefully, you start reaching for words and analogies that are fresh to you.
Exercise 1, 2 minutes
Write two or three sentences where the vowel sounds are all as short and clipped as you can make them – hat, bet, it, hot, cut
For example, ‘Bill was at it in a tick.’
Exercise 2, 3 minutes
Write two or three sentences where the vowel sounds are all as long as you can make them – far, feel, finite, fool, futon
For example, ‘Our lagoon’s bright blue sluice gate slowly closes.’
(I like the idea of having a little longer for the longer vowels.)
(These sounds make me think of Seamus Heaney’s poems.)
Exercise 3, 3 minutes
Write a line to describe four of the seven colours in the rainbow (your choice which four) using the form ‘as red as…’ ‘as orange as…’ For example ‘as red as Father Christmas’s elbow’.
Try to make your description one that no-one else is likely to come up with. So, don’t do ‘as red as fresh blood’ or ‘as red as a red rose’ or ‘as red as Rudolf’s nose’.
Exercise 4, 5 minutes
This is one I think I’ve shared here before.
Write a list that takes the form ‘neither A nor B’. But try to make A and B as far apart as you can. If one is a taste, the other is a multinational company. If one is a scientific term for a material, the other is a word you’ve just invented.
For example, Neither umame nor Massey Ferguson. Neither Pennisetum Purpureum nor brununoo.
The idea of this is to get you using all your vocabulary. If the words you know are notes on an instrument, there are some (middle C) that you’re going to be playing all the time, but some (harmonics) live higher up the scale and others (detuned bottom string) are buried far deeper in the lower registers. Here’s where you can sound them out and play something improvised with them, but still on your instrument (you) — just a few minutes, not a whole extended technique concerto. This should remind you that all of these possibilities exist within your repertoire, should you ever need them.
After you’ve done these warm-ups, which are definitely not for every single day, you should hopefully be feeling a bigger, stranger, stronger writer than when you sat down.
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oh I LOVE this, thank you