Getting Started

I've been involved in a number of conversations with a number of people recently about how I got my start doing something, and I feel like I never have a particularly exciting or insightful answer for the question. It doesn't matter if it's music or writing, I just feel like I found something I like to do and have tried to dedicate my time and efforts to getting in to that practice. 

For music, I was eight years old, I saw the movie "La Bamba" and immediately knew I wanted to play guitar. My parents had tried to get me to play piano first, since my sister had already been playing for a few years and was showing some promise, but I just couldn't get the hang of it no matter how I tried. Oddly enough, I still can't play piano to save my life, so that's something I guess I just have to just throw my hands up and say "oh well" to. I was lucky that maybe a month or two later, a teacher at my school started offering guitar lessons, and I immediately signed up. I was maybe eight years old, and for the first little while, it was kind of hellish: I remember a number of times my parents sent me to my room and threatened some kind of recourse if they didn't hear me playing guitar for at least half an hour. At the time there were probably a hundred things that I would have rather been doing, but now, some 23 years later, I am thrilled that they did it. Because I had a knowledge of reading music and all the basics of guitar playing, by the time I started listening to a lot of music that I wanted to play, I was able to pick things up much easier than friends who were just starting out. 

Since then, all I did was keep playing and playing until I couldn't play anymore. However, I also wonder from time to time nowadays if I have plateaued. It's strange: I don't feel the need to practice much on my own, since I can play what I feel like I want and need to play, but I still always want to believe that I'm getting better at the same time. Similarly, I am the worst person to ask if it is difficult to learn guitar or not: when you start playing as young as I did, you don't think about the challenge, and now that I've been playing for like 75% of my life, I believe that it comes second nature. I realize it doesn't, but I just can't think back to the old days of not knowing anything about guitars. There is plenty of stuff that I can't do, there are plenty of songs that I might never be able to play, but I can play as much as I want to for the time being, and I have to be content with that. 

Writing was a trickier question. You never really take lessons or anything like that, right? Yes, I realize taking English classes is like taking writing lessons, but only a portion of what I learned in school applies to writing that I might do for work (kids, if you're reading this, don't pay attention to that last sentence - school and English classes are the most important thing you can do with your life, ever). 

So when I had a former work acquaintance ask me "How did you get started as a copywriter?" I was completely flummoxed. For me, it has just been a part of self-discovery: I knew upon graduating high school that English and Band were the two areas in which I excelled. When I decided not to major in music, I didn't bat an eye before settling in on an English major. I graduated, I taught for a while, I went to grad school, and all the while, I wrote. I wrote this blog, I wrote lesson plans, I tweeted, I wrote hopefully entertaining Facebook posts, I wrote emails for myself and for my bands; I just plain wrote. It became a way of life. 

Yes, this is the point where you detractors will draw attention to the fact that my blogging has become infrequent at best, and my twitter account has been somewhat neglected, but I have a lot of irons in the fire at the moment. Bear with me. 

Much like music, I don't think of writing as something I work on anymore, it's just something I do. Yes, I work like hell on it, but to me it's all part of the writing process. I read, I edit things that I write, I edit things that other people write, I brainstorm; it's always going on even if I don't have things to show for it. I would like to say that I started writing when I was a little kid and I poked a few attempts at a story on my parents' old typewriter. It was god awful, I'm sure, but it was the first time I sat down and said, "I am going to write something" and sat there until the words came out. It's not unlike what I do now, but now I'm a lot more critical of my writing, and every now and again, someone pays me for the things I write. 

So how did you get your start? Did you determine this path early on, or did it evolve over time? I'm curious more than anything because I don't think that I've asked too many people that question myself, and the more the question rattles around my head and the more I try to formulate an answer, the more I kick myself for not asking of myself and of others sooner.