How is flying like writing?
Natalie Goldberg, a writing teacher and author, believes that the act of repeated, time-specific, automatic writing is essential to being a successful writer. She calls this "writing practice."
How do you get better at a sport? You practice. How do you play that sonata flawlessly? You practice. How do you know when to flare on landing? You practice. And to get better as a writer, you write.
In her book Wild Mind Goldberg emphasizes that you have to trust your ability to sit down and put words on a page. Even more to the point, you have to learn to "trust your own mind."
This is not so different from a student pilot's first solo. Often the teacher sees the student's capability before the student does. The teacher believes in the process.
As the podcaster of Don't Keep You Day Job, Cathy Heller said in her recent mini-episode about the capability of the brain to change, your teachers know through their experience "that if you keep showing up you can learn to…" fill in the blank.
(dontkeepyourdayjob.com/podcast)
"Genius is not innate," Heller says, "It's growth. It's resilience. It's resistance and showing up against it, over and over again."
What flight student hasn't experienced that resistance and showed up against it? What aspiring writer hasn't felt this way just sitting down to write?
When the day of a scheduled solo arrives, I have heard many flight students say they don't feel ready, even though they know they have taken all the tried and true steps to get to that point. Then they are airborne alone, and those hours -- in flight sims, in the air with their instructor, and on the ground reviewing checklists -- pays off and they fly, completely by themselves for the first time. And as they say in aviation, any landing you walk away from is a good landing.
Sam holds true for writing. You have to show up and write, time and time again, no matter how you are feeling. As a pilot once told me about her grueling studies with a full time job and a family to boot, "There is no inspiration. There's only motivation." And Goldberg would add, practice.
So, do you love to write, to fly, or both? (I hope you say both!) Then that's your motivation. How do you get to experience what you love? Through practice. Through the doing of it.
So practice. Push yourself to perform solo. Hit the submit button for pieces of your writing. Take to the sky and practice your touch and goes and full stops. Be confident knowing you did the prep work to get you there. Your developed skill set, and your confidence, will carry you through.
Sometimes staying safe on the ground, at your writing desk unpublished, is not an option. Sometimes you need to be seen and heard. Sometimes you need to fly. Your dreams require it.
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