Juggling onions

When I was learning to teach (in this case, self-defense, but that's not really important for my point), my teacher said that as you gain experience, you need to expand your perimeter of awareness. At first, you've only got the skills and experience to be able to worry about the techniques themselves and speaking clearly about them. Then you learn about keeping everyone physically safe (avoiding collisions and carelessly applied practice techniques, for example). Then you learn to read the students' reactions and watch how they practice. Then you learn to alter your lesson plan on the fly to adapt to how the class is dealing with the material. Then you learn to guide your teaching assistants so that they can make their best contribution to the learning process. Then you learn to make sure your students stay high-energy and focused; then your assistants. You learn to take in what's happening in the environment in general: who's on the sidelines, who's watching and whether they're supposed to be, whether the room is hot, cold, dry, secure. She likened it to the layers of an onion. (The fact that there are occasionally tears involved in learning to teach well, as in dealing with actual onions, was left unsaid.)

I've found that this metaphor has applied to the growth of my writing skills as well. First came learning to write grammatical sentences; luckily I read unceasingly as a child and picked much of that up by osmosis. Then I learned to form several connected thoughts into paragraphs, and to maintain my focus long enough to connect many, many paragraphs into chapters. I learned some things about plot, and about characterization. I learned quite a few things about how not to overwrite -- that one took a long time to start getting the hang of, and I'm still working on it. As I've become more comfortable with various aspects of writing, my focus has expanded to incorporate some of the more complicated skills.

Unfortunately, the onion metaphor doesn't quite work for writing, because I find I can't ever assume I have any one "layer" under control. It's more like juggling, because whenever I toss a ball exuberantly in the air, confident of my control and skill, it lands on my head.

Ow.

Chapter 13 of the book, possibly because of its number but more likely because I've been lacking in discipline, has been dragging on waaaaaay too long. Looks like I have to resume juggling onions....