I'm resolving to make lots of mistakes this year
and to take pleasure in doing some things very badly.
One of the most important life lessons came late for me. Perhaps it was actually unlucky, in a way, that I was always good at school, because that meant it was natural for me to gravitate towards doing only those things that came easily to me, where I got good marks and high praise.
I was good at reading and comprehension, as we called it in junior school, so that took me a long way in conventional education. I wrote essays intuitively, without necessarily understanding what made them work, or how to improve them and raise them to the next level. I was getting ‘A’s so there was no incentive. I wasn’t stretched, I didn’t need to make any effort, and so I coasted.
Yet from an early age all I wanted to do was write stories and novels. I wrote a few stories that sort of worked, and more that didn’t. But because of my experience with academic work, instead of carrying on and learning how to make them better, and setting myself the task of learning the craft of writing, I simply gave up. I decided I wasn’t good enough, and that was that.
I don’t know why, but somewhere inside, I think I believed that writing should be as natural and as easy as reading.
Why did all that change, so that now I am writing again, and doing the hardest work I have ever done? How did I come to realise that there are no short cuts, and that it’s not just about talent, it’s about practice?
I really learned this lesson by taking up the textile arts – a skill where, as a left brained academic type, I had no expectation of mastery.
I’d just been diagnosed with lupus, after suffering with unexplained ill health for many years, and I knew that I had to do something creative for its own sake. I remembered, with feelings of deep resentment, not getting my turn on the weaving looms at primary school. So I b0ught a loom.
How did I go about learning to weave?
Of course, I started off as I do with everything. I read voraciously. Before I invested in my first loom – a huge contraption that filled the dining room of our then old Victorian house, I read the Bible of weavers, Peter Collingwood’s book, The Techniques of Rug Weaving. I bought more books, and videos and I worked out how to do the basics. In the first few months, I made curtains and bedcovers, rugs and shawls and blankets.
Then, and this is typical of how I used to be, when I thought I knew a little about what I was doing, I went on a textile arts course.
It never occurred to me I could go on a course to learn something new, I was so afraid of being wrong and not knowing what I was doing, that I would painstakingly teach myself something from a book, that would much faster and easier and better be picked up from an experienced teacher.
Fortunately, I found a very good textiles tutor, who in many ways fixed the basic underlying problem with my approach to learning. Where I had always been rewarded in the past based purely on achievement, she made me feel good about trying new things, making mistakes, and then improving on them.
When it came to time for grading the class, my tutor was very apologetic. She said that of all the students she had ever taught (and this was her retirement year) – I had actually made the most progress. She’d never had a student who was so academic, who had started so far back, who knew nothing about colour and design and was scared of a box of crayons.
If I ever make a writer, it will in large part be due to that textiles tutor, who was the first person ever to give me a fail grade.
So, this year, the more mistakes I make the better. It means I am trying new things, and taking the risks that are fundamental to a creative life.
After all, how will you ever know if you could be any good at something, if you aren’t prepared to be a beginner, to be bad at it? There was a time, I couldn’t even tie my shoelaces…
