Read this essay online or reprint it at:
http://www.vancouverdiaries.com/never-a-day-without-a-line

This is a chapter from The Vancouver Diaries:
http://www.vancouverdiaries.com

Never a Day Without a Line

Nulla Dies Sine Linea

Buck Up Champ. Being boring is easy. Anything requires thankless effort and irrational levels of persistence. -- CheeseBurgerBrown

Michael David Crawford
January 24, 2008

One day I asked my friend Reypulque why Superman wasn't able to win World War II single-handedly. He replied, "The Nazis had kryptonite."

Repulque with His Free CD

Originating from Superman's destroyed home planet Krypton, kryptonite emitted an invisible radiation that robbed him of his super-powers.

Ordinarily I'm a very industrious guy. It's quite common for me to work twenty-hour days; several times I've worked forty hours non-stop. You can see evidence of how hard I work from my resume and the index to my writing. Lately I've been practicing piano for two hours a day with the aim of going to music school someday.

But there is a form of kryptonite that robs me of my power; I can't see it, but I can feel its deadly rays.

Fatigue.

When I am tired, I am weak as a kitten. I am powerless - and defenseless.

It's been happening to me a lot lately.

I'm not sure where I first came across the title of this diary - Nulla Dies Sine Linea. It is advice given by the Romans to artists: "Never a day without a line."

I thought it was a Kuro5hin member's response to Why I Write, in which I said:

But there is a problem, one that I have struggled to understand for quite some time, and only recently feel I have come to understand, but not yet found the solution to: I am only able to write sporadically, when a topic seizes me somehow. I cannot write when I choose, or on any topic I choose. I cannot write to deadlines. Each year I write hundreds of pages, but on widely scattered topics. I have started but failed to finish several books. I was offerred a monthly column in a computer magazine once, and did a good job at my first column, but failed to write any more. I finally published it on my own website, just so it would see the light of day.

On Writing
A Memoir of the Craft

by Stephen King

[ Buy at Amazon]
[ Buy at Powell's]

Quite a bit of searching didn't turn it up, but I did find Nosf3ratu's advice:

Write. I don't give a flying fuck if you feel like it or not. You must do it. The more you do it, the more you want to do it. The most prolific writers are the best writers, and vice-versa.

Instead of bitching and moaning that the writer in you only makes brief appearances, make him get to work.

I suggest you read Stephen King's On Writing; it is excellent in many ways.

Nosf3ratu also quoted On Writing:

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.

Professionalism

But I was talking about kryptonite. Remember the kryptonite? It causes me fatique.

I've had it real bad lately. I have always had trouble waking from sleep, but for most of my life I've been fine once I've been up for a little while. Lately though I've been having the most awful time getting up at all: even once I wake up, I lie in bed for several hours feeling like I've been hit by a truck. Eventually I stagger out the door to the cafe for a coffee, but it doesn't seem to help.

This makes it hard for me to practice piano. But I've been able to steel my courage by saying to myself "Never a day without a line". And for the last little while I have been practicing two hours every day - the first hour playing five sets of all the major and minor scales I know, two octaves up and down with both hands in parallel motion. In a few more days I'll know all forty-eight of them!

And quite suddenly, I started to make blazing progress. I had a wonderful teacher named Angela Bonilla back in Vancouver, but I'm afraid I wasn't such a good student. I didn't make that much progress during my time there.

I have known for some time that there doesn't seem to be much of a relationship between the apparent difficulty of a song and my ability to learn it. Some of the songs from my Conservatory Canada Grade One book had completely stymied me for several years. But I was able to learn Pachelbel's Canon - a much more complex piece than any in the Grade One book - in just a few weeks.

But then I was really motivated - it was our wedding song. Bonita and I hired a string quartet to play it, all of them Memorial University of Newfoundland music students. I didn't think I would be able to get it at first, but I persisted, working at just one or two measures at a time until I could play the whole thing.

Something has changed about the way I study piano in just the last couple weeks: I'm learning new material very quickly. I'm steadily working my way through Bach's Prelude in C from the Well-Tempered Clavier; Angela tried to teach it to me but I was never able to get it. I'm also suddenly able to play a couple of the songs from my Grade One book that I had been struggling with since 2003!

I took up running recently, thinking that it would help with the fatigue, and in fact on the days that I have run, I have felt much better afterwards. I'm way out of shape, so I'm not yet able to run very far, but even that little bit helps.

What's This?

Read this essay online or reprint it at:
http://www.vancouverdiaries.com/never-a-day-without-a-line

This is a chapter from The Vancouver Diaries:
http://www.vancouverdiaries.com