Travis Eneix

It’s National Novel Writing Month, and I just eeked across the half way mark this morning. I’m a tad behind, but this weeks pep talk from the NaNoWriMo admins came from Neil Gaiman, and it put me back in good spirits. I was thinking about that while teaching Aikido this morning.

There’s a saying in Hollywood in the film making industry, “You have ten bad movie in you, now go make them.”

There’s a similar adage amongst writers, “You have 500,000 bad words in you, now go write them.”

I’d like to introduce the following adage to the Aikidoist world, “You have 100,000 bad techniques in you, now go do them.”

In an average hour long class I would guesstimate that I get through about 100 techniques. With taking three classes a week (in addition to the three I teach), that puts me at 300 techniques. Fifty two weeks a year comes to 15,600 techniques. So, after 6.4 years I should have gotten through my bad techniques and gotten into some good ones. Hmmmm, looking back from just over 11 years on that mat, I’d say that’s not too far off.

This is kind of the reverse of the old axiom, “Practice make perfect.” Instead it’s more akin to, “Repetition makes less not-perfect.” Being good at anything takes time and effort, and to have a goal to shoot for is incredibly useful. When writing into a void it is easy to get discouraged, thinking when will I ever get any good at this? With a target number of words, the edge is taken off the long hours of writing crap. So far, I am just about 175,000 words in. Another couple of years and I might actually be decent.

Stumble it!