Woodshedding for Writers?

For this episode, we’re going to be talking about woodshedding. It’s a new concept for me. Well, it’s not a new concept as much as it is a new term. Hmmm. A musician’s term. Isolating yourself somewhere so you can work through a tough or new passage until you’ve got it down. Internalized it. Imbued it in the memory of your fingers. Made it second nature. I see how this could be useful. I’m guessing it’s required of all musicians. How else could musicians improvise together or emotionally interact with an audience unless they’ve got the bones of the song down pat? I can see so many ways that woodshedding could be useful for musicians.

But what about non-musical contexts? My thoughts immediately turn to digital storytelling, but maybe I should focus more broadly on writing. I’m at a bit of a loss. What repetitive exercise can a writer perform to internalize a practice to the point where it becomes muscle memory? At the moment, I don’t know. The closest practice I can think of is to memorize other people’s work. Lines, stanzas, even whole poems. Stories’ opening lines. Evocative patches of description or dialogue. And then to make a practice of reciting these passages. Maybe there’s something to this analogy, but I don’t think I’m there. Not even close.

Maybe my jumping directly from music to the written word was hasty. Because I’m not a songwriter, my immediate analytical frame was performance. Watching or listening are pretty much the only ways I understand music and musicians. Woodshedding makes perfect sense through that frame, but only in the sense that woodshedding is practice. Practicing internalizes performance so that a musician can pay attention to other things while performing.

Huh. That’s a new insight for me. I always thought of practicing as a way of avoiding mistakes while performing for an audience. I suspect that approach gets you as far as a serviceable amateur. Someone who brings a guitar to a campfire so they can play Blowin’ in the Wind well enough for everyone to sing along. And it’s beautiful. I would LOVE to be able to play a few Tom Waits songs whenever I wanted.

But this understanding of woodshedding doesn’t get at the creative potential of woodshedding. I suspect that for a musician, one of the most important purposes of woodshedding is to internalize the performance enough that it takes little or no creative effort to “get it right.” You’ve gotten it right so many times, that’s now your default performance. But I don’t mean to characterize internal performances as dull. Just the opposite. Only by internalizing the song, the riff, the solo, can the performance itself become creative.

I think of Bowie’s charisma as Ziggy Stardust or Prince playing Purple Rain at the Superbowl. There’s the creative stage of writing the songs into existence and shaping them into something complete. Then there’s the stage of internalizing the songs to the point where they become the material for a whole new level of creativity. Prince’s rehearsals are legendary for his demand for precision. James Brown, too. I’m starting to understand that this repetition wasn’t necessarily to perform a flawless set, but to get to the point where the performance itself could become a creative act.

That’s all fine, I guess, if you’re a musician. But what about the rest of us? How do we find our woodshed and what do we do once we’re there?

Damn. Got distracted with an insight. Stupid journaling.

Instead of jumping straight from music to the written word, maybe pottery (as opposed to ceramic arts) would be a closer analogy. Most competent potters have thrown thousands of any given form: mugs, plates, bowls, vases, etc. The process of throwing a bowl, the same bowl over and over, becomes a repeated set of discrete moves. Center the ball of clay. Give it a proper initial shape. Sink a finger or two down into the center to establish the bowl’s base. Pull the walls up and out while establishing the wall’s curve. Form the bowl’s lip. Stop the wheel. Cut and remove the form. Repeat. Again and again and again. The muscles eventually remember.

We’ve already covered two levels of creativity for the musician: bringing a song into existence and the performance of that song. It’s an over-simplification to say that there’s an initial version of the song. I get that, but I do assume there’s some moment or period when a musician first starts to feel like the notes, snippets, melodies, and lyrics coalesce into a song. And then there’s the process of practicing the song’s performance where it continues to evolve, but it’s still a version or revision of that initial song, albeit more mature or refined.

This analogy seems to hold true for the potter, too. There’s an initial form sketched out in a notebook or explored at the wheel until they sense that it coheres. And then through the repetition of production, the form, like the song, carries that initial form through to a more confident and consistent reproduction. But it’s only through that repetition and muscle memory that a potter can work on the subtleties of the form.

I’m still not getting there. I really want there to be a written word version of woodshedding. Maybe I’m thinking too literally about the process and products of woodshedding. Musicians practice scales and riffs and bridges; they produce songs and performances. Potters use the same basic hand positions and movements and sequences; they produce the idea of a shape and repeated instances of that shape. I can’t think of an analogous repeated process for a writer.

For these two crafts, repetition is both the process and product of woodshedding. But I’ve been distracted into thinking that repetition is the goal and mechanism of woodshedding.