on learning new things

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I’ve been thinking a lot these days about learning new things. I’m blowing dust off a major project, a zero draft I bumbled through in 2015, which (to put it dramatically) scarred me in some way. My failure to rework that piece constantly reminds me that I don’t know how to write longer things. That sounds rough, but these days I’m starting to embrace a particular idea again: it’s just a fact, that I don’t know how.

So what am I going to do about it?

I’m trying to get into the right frame of mind by reminding myself that everything I’m now pretty good at, I once sucked at. Or I had no way to assess how I was doing, and doing it freaked me out, but I did it anyway.

🚗

I remember the first time a friend offered to drive me somewhere. We were in high school. It was a short distance—from her house to my grandmother’s house, in the same residential neighborhood in Manila.

“You’ll drive me?” I said, awed.

“Sure,” she answered.

Wow. This person, who was the same age as me, was now doing complicated stuff with a pedal and a gear-thingy, and the car was moving! Damn!

A year later I started learning to drive myself. The driving school I attended was on Katipunan, an extremely busy street in Quezon City, across the university where I was a first-year student. The driving instructor got into the passenger’s seat, pointed out all the necessities on the dashboard, told me one pedal was gas and the other was brake, then asked me to reverse the car. Onto Katipunan. I was aghast, but I’ve always been great at following teachers, so I did as I was told.

I was so tense that my side hurt the entirety of our two-hour lesson. I think my stomach was clenched the whole time. (Traffic is terrible in Manila so cars move slowly, but no one follows traffic rules; it’s all finesse and gut feel.) I remember thinking it was kind of a miracle we made it back in one piece, but…I hadn’t even scratched the car!

Learning to drive taught me that the things I don’t know how to do literally seem miraculous to me. There’s also some benefit to just going for it; learning by doing is often the best way. Ideally you have someone who can reach over and grab the steering wheel if you’re doing something too dangerous, but unfortunately, that’s just not the case with writing. On the other hand, there are no lasting damages when it comes to writing (well…at least in the drafting stage), so you might as well roll onto that terrible highway.

🚲

I learned to ride a bike when I was twenty years old. I was moving to the US and thought it might be useful to know how. I took my brother’s bike to our garden and gave it a go. I couldn’t even get it to stand right. I had no idea how to pedal. I just kinda rocked from side to side on the seat, my feet planted on either side of me. What was balance? I’ve always had terrible balance.

I fled indoors to Google “adult learning to ride a bike.” An article suggested removing training wheels and going down a hill over and over again, with your legs stuck out, until you can balance. No pedaling. I went back to the garden. I tried this. I fell over and over. My yaya came out and laughed. “Ta,” she said. “Anong ginagawa mo?” (“Isa, what are you doing?”)

“Gusto kong matuto mag-bike,” I said. (“I want to learn how to bike.”) She offered to show me how, but watching made no sense. She told me to be careful.

I fell over and over again the next afternoon, and the next. One time, when I fell, the bike landed on my leg; I got bruised, and the chain cut into my skin. Demoralized, I took to Google again. I somehow found a video of a much older woman, laughing as she made little loops around a basketball court. The video was called something like: first time riding a bicycle—finally!!

I returned to the garden. I went down the short slope of grass. After a couple of tries, I somehow made it down without the bike tipping over. After a couple more tries, my feet seemed to gain brains all on their own, and hit the pedals.

I circled our garden, almost entirely on instinct. I went another round. Emboldened, I pedaled out to our street and down our block. I didn’t know how to turn, but I turned. Pedaling back up the hill to our house was difficult—but doable. Somehow, magically, I had learned how to bike. I went around the block one more time to be sure. Yaya came outside and said, “O, natuto ka!” (“Oh, you learned!”)

Oftentimes learning takes falling over and over. I do think it might have been easier to learn biking as a kid. The older you get, the taller you get, and the scarier it seems to fall down. I think managing fear was a big part of that somehow, the first time I successfully made it down the hill. I tried not to care about falling. It was impossible to be completely fearless, but honestly, I’d already fallen so much anyway. What was another bruise or two?

🎶

I got my first ukulele in 2016. I’d waffled about learning to play for several years by then. My younger brother, fed up with my indecision, told me to “just freaking learn it then.” I got a Kala Shark for $55, a Snark clip-on tuner, then started hunting around YouTube for lessons. The first major challenge was strumming. I had to watch several different videos to grok it. My brain felt disconnected from my fingers. Even holding the instrument was awkward. It also hurt a lot to press down on the strings. I wished my callouses would develop faster.

One of my favorite YouTube ukulele instructors, Cynthia Lin, happened to be teaching group classes in the city I was living in. I decided to sign up for her six-week class. Attending those lessons was a great forcing mechanism. I learned a new song each week, and most songs were designed to teach us new techniques: chucking, plucking, shifting between certain chords. We repeated transitions over and over, slowly at first—G to F#m, Dm to Em—until our fingers got used to it. Cynthia told us to play a little each day.

I told her once, “Cynthia, it’s hard because my hand is small!”

She looked at me straining with a barred chord, and nodded. “Yeah, your hand is tiny. Keep working on it.” Neither of us could do anything about my stubby fingers; all I could do was practice, and build up finger strength, until they could stretch over the chords the way they needed to.

Learning from an awesome instructor makes a difference. So does having some kind of accountability system.

It’s 2020 now and I’ve been told by people that I’m good at playing the ukulele. At first I wasn’t sure about this comment. I’m not trying to be humble. I genuinely think the ukulele is an instrument where you can impress pretty easily—with four chords and one essential strum pattern (DDU UDU), you can play a ton of songs. Especially if you like singing (which I do!), it’s easy to get to a baseline of ukulele-playing. (Very handy around campfires.)

When I considered it, though, I realized: I have gotten better, beyond those basics. It’s in how I think about improving, mostly. Now when I look at certain chords that were once utterly impossible, I know to try different finger arrangements to see which works well for me. Or if I watch someone’s cover and I like their strum, I slow the video down to .75x or .5x speed and try to understand what rhythm they’re using. I can’t always get it, but I can sometimes come up with something close.

Another place I can see my own improvement is in videos. I first posted a recording of myself playing a song on the ukulele in 2016—it was an impulse to share what I’d learned (I mean, I am a fanfic writer). In that video, I very obviously pause over my transitions for basic chords. Now I can play those chords without thinking. After a while, my brain and fingers did get better at coordinating with each other! (This remains untrue for the spiteful E chord, however. Among others.)

The tough thing about creative work sometimes is that the practice you put in is invisible to other people. They only see the finished product. I probably do twenty, thirty takes of a song before it goes up. (If I was more of a perfectionist about my music, I’d do twice or thrice that.) Similarly, no one sees your bumbling writing drafts; they only see the end result. And that end result is what we compare ourselves against all the time. Wouldn’t it be interesting, to pick up a book and see all the ghost-impressions of the drafts that were necessary to make it?

I have a long way to go with the ukulele, but I’m somewhat patient with it. I know that repetition and regular practice really add up. Also, I try to keep it interesting by learning new things all the time—there’s always new songs, new strum patterns, new chords to wage war with. Maybe the best part of the ukulele for me, though, is that I don’t pressure myself with it. When I play, I’m just trying to have fun.

🤔

Unfortunately, I don’t know if it’s possible to avoid pressure with writing. It’s hard for me to measure my progress, and it’s hard not to be afraid.

But maybe my defeated feelings about this project are the writing equivalent of the bruised legs I experienced while learning to ride a bike. Maybe the anxiety I feel every time I think about this story is the same as the idea of reversing into freaking Katipunan the first time I ever drove a car. Maybe it’ll take thirty drafts to get it right, in the same way that I have to play a song thirty times before I capture it on video without messing up—sometimes in the last damn measure. (Some of you might be like “Only twenty drafts!”—I mean, pick whichever number is extreme for you.)

You know, I first explored this idea in 2017.

Sure, it makes me a little sad, that it’s three years later, and I still don’t know how. Also, nearly every writer I know says each book is a different beast and writing the first won’t necessarily teach you to write the next ones. (Seriously, guys? Gah.)

I do allow myself these feelings, as a kindness, but I know being too sad won’t help me much in the long run. Eventually I’ll need to take this bike to the top of the hill, stick my legs out, and give it another go. Maybe we can try together?

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you in two weeks, where I’ll be talking about milestones (I’ve got two significant ones coming up…but I also have issues with that significance). If you liked this, feel free to share it with others, or sign up if you haven’t yet. And if you have a writing-related question you’d like me to answer, hit me up at yap.isabel@gmail.com.