Amateur is NOT a Bad Word

Sarah here. I am thrilled to be guest posting for MaryAnn this week. Thanks for having me back, everyone! I am tempted to wave at the screen like you can see me. This must stop. On to the post...

I am constantly rearranging my living room. I can’t help myself. The furniture doesn’t fit. There’s no good place for a TV. A support post divides the room into odd shapes, with a fireplace on the wrong wall. And then there’s the Steinway grand piano.

My parents dipped into my college fund to buy this piano when I was 13. It was understood that I would take the piano someday, when I had a house of my own. (Also that I would go college in-state. Wahoowa!) My husband and I searched and searched for a house in our price range that could accommodate it. That turned out to be an impossible dream in 2007 Los Angeles, so we went all in on what we could afford and gave up on the grand.

Then my parents retired and sold my childhood home to move across the country, and the piano was homeless. My husband and I looked at our living room, measured a few things, looked some more, and agreed. We would fit it. Sort of. 

The Beast. I don't know if I picked the right spot, but I can't move it.

Family and friends all thought this was a bad idea, space-wise. They were right. The piano is lovely, but it is not helping my decorating problems. I fantasize about selling it, and how nice it would be to have a normal living room with an entertainment center along the piano wall and space to walk around the furniture.

I can’t sell it.

Music vs. Writing: Upping the Ante

I used to practice almost every day, until I decided to focus more on writing. As a mom of young children and a Netflix addict, I don’t have the time or discipline for two passions.

I discovered a huge difference between playing piano and writing novels, although I do think the former helps my typing. Novels come with expectations. People find out I write and ask, “Have you been published?” Then they tell me about a friend who has been trying to sell his novel for the last twenty-five years.

The grand piano is humble in its hobby-ness. No one ever asks me, “Where have you performed?” Or, “Do you have any recordings?” Because that would be idiotic.

99.99% chance of not being the next
Evgeny Kissin, but oh well.

In high school, I was stumbling over arpeggios at a lesson when my teacher took a phone call from a new student's parent. She hung up and shook her head. The parent had said something piano teachers hear a lot: “We aren’t training little Johnny to be a concert pianist.”

My teacher laughed and said to me, “Do you know how many concert pianists there are in the world? I can count them on my fingers. I can promise little Johnny is not going to be a concert pianist."

To my knowledge, she was right. But I bet he learned a lot from her, like how to study tone and rhythm and dynamics and follow them down a predictable path to unpredictable beauty. That's what I learned, anyway.

Writing is different. Writing is seductive in its accessibility. Who hasn’t read a mediocre book, even a best-seller, and thought, “I could have written that”? When we get bitten by the writing bug, it’s easy to decide we’re going to be professionals. We encourage each other to cultivate the dogged determination to get published. We complain that other writers who talk a big game should, ahem, make with the number two or vacate the lavatory. We have the optimism of knowing that success is something we might realistically achieve, but we bear the weight of that same knowledge. 

Do what you love and the money will... matter less.

Determination is good. Treating writing like a job is good… if it works. But all that pressure can backfire. If you’re feeling like you should have landed an agent by now or you should be writing faster or you should be improving faster, then I have a suggestion: Be an amateur. Be an amateur the way musicians who practice every day are amateurs. Be an amateur the way kids taking piano lessons get to be amateurs. 

The thing you have when you’re young and never, ever appreciate (aside from glowing skin and miracle metabolism) is the freedom to concentrate on whatever interests you and work at getting better. Once you have bills and kids and all those grown-up responsibilities, it’s hard to let yourself work at things that aren’t paid (or just plain necessary, if you’re an at-home parent).

It’s hard to justify hours at the piano bench when no one will ever make a direct deposit to hear your Chopin. It’s hard to justify hours at your computer when you don’t know if what you’re writing will sell or rot in a drawer. Meanwhile, a little voice is saying you wouldn’t feel guilty about the time if you just made some money at it.

Treating “amateur” like an insult can make us forget where the word comes from, which is love. Love is what turns work into play and play into work.

I think that’s why the piano continues to dominate my living room, and maybe why my husband is as attached to it as I am. It's more than sentimental; it’s a physical reminder that losing yourself in something you love has value beyond money. Or space for the TV.

As my writing goals evolve, the biggest one is to never stop being an amateur at heart, a person who does what she does because the reward is in the doing. I hope the same for everyone who is lucky enough to love something.

~Sarah