My ukulele teacher told me to stop being so nervous. Has anyone ever told you to stop feeling nervous? It’s an impossible directive to follow, especially if you’re not actually nervous but rather someone with Type A tendencies trying hard to master something new. But no matter. He said I was nervous, and I tried to look otherwise, and the lesson continued.
I had no reason to be nervous. I was learning the ukulele for fun, on a whim. My husband already owned a ukulele that was gathering dust, and I’d heard this instrument was easy to learn. I figured I’d watch a few YouTube tutorials and crank out a song or two in no time.
In reality, learning was a struggle. For someone who has never played a string instrument and is not musically gifted, the online tutorials didn’t cut it. Instead, they only gave me bad habits, like strumming too hard and attempting techniques well beyond my experience level. But because I can’t bear to quit anything once I’ve started, I caved and signed up for lessons.
Learning a new skill as an adult is a humbling experience. I felt the same way a few years ago, when I took a pottery class and brought home a collection of lumpy, misshapen vases. Then there was the painting class, where the instructor praised my use of color only to visibly lose faith when he saw how I failed to arrange that color into recognizable figures or landscapes. And when I returned to horseback riding as an adult, I spent months trying to regain the riding finesse of my childhood, all while teenagers rode literal circles around me. In that case, even though I had prior experience, I still felt hopelessly unable to catch up.
Writing is the one part of my life that I’ve pursued steadily since my youth. Count me among the writers considered precocious as children—always reading, writing, and dreaming of future literary greatness. We are not unique, no matter what our fourth-grade English teachers told us. Talk to some MFA application readers, and I’m sure they’ll wearily tell you how many statements of purpose open with a description of the applicant’s childhood love of books and writing.
Coming to writing later in life, I imagined, must be an entirely different experience. These writers don’t have childhoods full of literary praise and assurances of their “natural talent,” and they don’t have that lifelong sense of purpose to hold onto when times are tough at the writing desk. No, writers who get a later start must be driven in an entirely different way.
Late Bloomers
Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker essay about artistic late bloomers puts it like this: prodigies are easy, but late bloomers are hard. He writes:
On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all. Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith.
When I think about writers who come to the game a bit later than others, I can’t help but think of Jackie, who was in my MFA cohort at Bowling Green State University. Jackie entered the MFA program in her forties, following successful careers in voice and musical theater. She’s a lifelong lover of books, but she only turned to creative writing seriously as an adult. Once in the MFA program, she compared herself to her younger classmates and was overcome by insecurity. She says:
I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing and everyone else had a leg up on me in some way. I felt like I was there by luck alone, or because I was older and they wanted me for diversity’s sake. In workshop, I was constantly overcompensating. I felt I needed to write more, that I didn’t know as much . . . It was only when I started surrendering to the fact that I could get better if I just trusted what I was doing that it started to turn around. When I admitted I had something to learn, that was freeing.
I can state for the record that Jackie is a wonderful writer, and watching her grow throughout the MFA program was a highlight for me. But even as Jackie overcame her insecurities, she still faced struggles others didn’t in workshop. For example, while she’s quick to praise her younger classmates for making her a better writer, she wonders if sometimes they struggled to identify with the experiences she depicted on the page.
“I was bringing something different to the table, and maybe they didn’t know what to do with that,” she says. “At first I translated this as, ‘You’re not writing well enough or writing to appeal to them,’ but really they haven’t yet been where I’d been.”
The post-MFA transition was trying for Jackie, as it is for many writers. As she worked to sustain a writing routine outside of the program and in the face of external pressures, she found comfort in returning to something she’d already mastered: music. She began singing again, an art form that she’d spent more than a decade studying seriously.
“I returned to singing because I felt very lost,” she says. “When I returned to singing in a recreational form, it made me want to write more. It made me want to hear my voice again.”
Making Use of that Voice
There’s no question I’m more comfortable at my writing desk than I am strumming the ukulele. Let’s just say no one would ever claim I’m a “natural” at this instrument. But that doesn’t mean I can’t learn and improve.
When I showed up to my second ukulele lesson, I waited for my instructor to wrap up with his previous student. She finally emerged from the lesson room, looking all of nine years old. Every other student I’d encountered in that music store was a child, and yet there I was, an adult woman clutching a ukulele.
My instructor popped his head around the door. “No need to wait,” he told me. “If you’re ready, come on in.”
I went in. This time he didn’t say that I seemed nervous, and I wasn’t. Granted, the ukulele isn’t a calling for me like writing is for Jackie. It’s a tentative hobby. It’s something new. But every now and then, as I struggle through a chord progression, I can almost sense what it might feel like to be able to play for real. And I think of writers like Jackie finding their writing voices, no matter their age.
“I want to write now because I want to hear that voice again,” Jackie told me. “That voice has something to say.”