Rusty

Yesterday I found myself in need of a change of pace, so instead of spending a bit of free time writing or editing, I picked up my acoustic guitar and played. I tuned the thing to double drop D, just to give myself a little more variety than the usual standard tuning and maybe exercise some different parts of my brain.

So I noodled around the fretboard for a few minutes, enjoying the sounds I was creating, little rhythms up and down the neck. Then I tried my hand at a couple of familiar songs in that tuning: Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” and Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California.” Both of these involve a bit of fingerpicking, and so are more challenging than simple noodling and strumming. The originals also were performed by guitar virtuosos, Lindsay Buckingham and Jimmy Page, who set high standards for fingerpicking. After fumbling through a few attempts at each, I recalled that “Black Water,” by the Doobie Brothers, was also in double drop D, but I couldn’t remember all of the chords and the transitions seemed kind of tricky, so I stumbled through it more so than I did the others.

I played for about thirty minutes. Not a long session by any means, especially when you consider I used to practice (or play) for an hour or more most days or evenings not that many years ago. But I had gotten rusty. After thirty minutes, my left wrist was aching and the uncallused fingertips on that hand were tender from moving around the strings. I was surprised at how “out of shape” I’d gotten when it comes to playing the guitar, although I shouldn’t have been.

What does this have to do with writing? In the same way we can get rusty by not practicing a musical instrument regularly, so can we get rusty when we don’t write regularly. That’s why it’s important to write every damn day, or almost every day, even if it’s just journaling. If you’re stuck in your writing, switch to a different genre for a day or two. If your works in progress are short stories or a novel, set them aside and try your hand at poetry, or creative nonfiction. Or, like me, try a different creative outlet — pick up that musical instrument that’s been gathering dust, or that sketch pad and your pencils, or put on some music and dance.

I don’t know, honestly, how much my little guitar session helped. If anything, it made me miss the days when I would get lost for hours playing that instrument, and made me wonder if spending time writing and editing and submitting short stories was worth the effort. After receiving three rejections yesterday, I’m feeling a bit blue. But I also know that rejections are part of the gig, that even with the enormous number of literary outlets there are these days, the editors of them are fielding scores of submissions, and not all of them will make the cut. So I press on and write.

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