Couple years back while I was teaching in Roanoke, I grabbed a few seconds of footage of this line of folks casting fishing lines on a grass lawn. At first blush I just thought it was one of those amusing visuals for its absurdity.
No water within sight. Just a grass lawn, train tracks and asphalt of nearby streets and sidewalks of downtown Roanoke.
But now as I watch it, I see something I didn't see at first.
This is what practice is. It's taking an essential act and rehearsing it over and over and over with one single-minded intention: to hone one's skill. It's what we do when we practice one phrase of a song over and over or rehearse a page or two of dialogue just to be sure we've got every little if, and or but committed to memory and we understand the flow of ideas from top to bottom. It's what it means to review a dance move over and over and over until it loses its meaning.
This line of people casting their fishing lines again and again and again are the embodiment of the discipline of daily practice. There's no need for water at this early stage. First they need to master the art of casting the line.
We playwrights can take a lesson from these folks.
Before we rush to cast our lines out into a full house, we'd do ourselves (and our audiences!) a favor by working and reworking our material top to bottom until we know it forwards and backwards.
Audiences will reward us when we do.
No comment re: the fishes.
