Warming Up for the Big Game

Warming Up for the Big Game

I’ve decided to create a new kind of running club for people who don’t really like running. Every two weeks, we’ll meet and have races. If you don’t like your time on a particular run, you can do it a second time. But in between races, there’s no obligation to run at all.

With all of the free time I’ll have not running, I’m going to start an orchestra. As long as you can read music, you can come to rehearsal and just sight-read the piece. After one run-through, we’ll be ready for the show!

I think you get the point. And you’re probably rolling your eyes at me, as well. But tell me honestly—have you ever done writing warm-ups before a school paper, let alone writing practice in between assignments? The very idea of writing just to practice writing is incomprehensible to most students. Yet those same students run laps on the school track or run scales on an instrument. Why? You’re not getting anywhere!

The point of running laps, as we both know, isn’t to get somewhere—it’s to get stronger. Just so with freewriting or “writing practice.” As a follower of writer and teacher Natalie Goldberg, I belong to the “practice school of writing”: the more you do, the better you get.

Ideas in your head may be too large to capture in a sentence or too small to describe in a word, too vague to put your finger on or too multidimensional to grasp. When you want to write them down, you have to force them to lie flat on the page, to line up in neat rows. Every time you begin that process and the ideas don’t cooperate, you experience frustration and fear—what if I can’t write after all?

But every time you practice putting the ideas on the page, you improve your skill in the process. Sentences sound a little more smooth. You recognize that there are many ‘right places’ to begin; you can start describing the idea from any side.

If it’s spring of your junior year, it’s a smidge too early to start your essays. You want to be ahead of the game, and aiming to be done before September 1 (or whenever you start school, whichever comes first) is a good and achievable goal. But I don’t recommend starting before June, partly because spring of your junior year is crazy busy, and partly because you are busy growing and becoming a better writer every day.

But what you CAN be doing is warming up. Writing practice will improve your writing skill, as well as give you opportunities to dig around in your memory to explore what you might want to write about in your essays. Add writing practice to your assignment calendar, at least one 15-minute session each week—better yet, two or three. You can always start with one of Goldberg’s recommended prompts, “I want to write about …” and see where it takes you. Or if you need a more specific hook to start from, find me on Instagram @carakalf, where you’ll get a new prompt several times each week.

(Photo by Bruno Nascimento on Unsplash.)