In dance, they have a saying: “Back to the barre.”
It means back to basics. Get your form right. Stand at the barre and work on your technique: plié, Tendu, relevé, Dégagé.
First principles.
The music people tell me this is called, “practicing your scales.”
I’ve tried to figure out what the “barre” and “scales” equivalent is in writing. I have no idea.
Writing technique is not something you hone in isolation the way you practice your turnout. You don’t work on your verbs or prepositional phrases. I guess you could familiarize yourself with the dictionary to improve your vocabulary? But good vocabulary does not a writer make.
You hone your technique by writing.
A story, a poem, an essay, an email, a chapter, a scene.
From there you can play with perspective, pacing, tone, dialogue, plot.
But you can’t do it without sitting down and contending with the full page.
It’s through the act of writing a sentence that leads up to a story that you improve. It’s through the editing, the revisions, the reworks that your writing gets better.
Perhaps our “back to the barre” equivalent is merely the decision to sit at our desks, and write.
Margo
