I’ll spare too many details, but the short version is that I’ve been meaning to upgrade for a while and we have three travel adventures planned over the next year, not to mention a long list of local walking and running adventures, and I’ve been craving having a (reliable) camera back in my hands for action videography. Long story short, I splurged and… well… new toy.

One of the upgrades from my decade-old model tho piqued my curiosity: the new one has a front facing screen intended, as I am given to understand, for video blogging selfie-style recording.

Ugh—was my first thought. I’m not very good at that.

Hmmm—was my second thought: maybe that’s actuall a skill I should try to learn.

New camera, new approach, new skill. And oh look! I have this place where I write and post about just that sort of thing: honing creative skills.

Not everyone has a voice for video. Not everyone has a confidence for turning the camera on oneself and hitting record. And heck, I would be the poster model for those two hesitations and probably a long list of others I haven’t even considered.

Maybe it’s time to remedy that.

Maybe. 

Or maybe I’ll just take some good running videos.

Start small.

Start with the achievable and work your way up.

I have been planning this novel-length audio production, writing words, making scripts, composing music, mixing sounds, and—nothing firm has been done yet.

The big project is simply too overwhelming.

Oh sure, I see the forest, but I can’t seem to plant the trees. It all feels like I’m jumping into a new plan, a new skill, a new concept without knowing if any of it will even work—and more importantly if something critical will fail. And the result is paralysis incarnate.  

Something smaller has to come first.

In my case, maybe instead of trying to make a novel, I record some audio blogs first. Then maybe after I do that, I work on making a few one-pager short stories into encapsulated one-off samples of what I’m hoping to create on a larger scale. And then, maybe something else, and something else after that, and maybe… eventually, the real thing will fall into place.

I’m sure many great people have achieved great things in one fell swoop… but the rest of us may need to build up our stamina first.

My Kid (who I’ve mentioned is a theatre student) famously jibes me because the only stage performance I have ever done was in the fourth grade where I was a winkie in an elementary production of The Wizard of Oz. I had one line, and we put on a single show.

I have been working on a project to “dramatically read” my novel and post it as a mid-production podcast, chapter by chapter.

Now, you say, why not get your daughter to read some of it? And you’d be right in suggesting it, but the truth is that working on this thing is as much for my own edification as it is about the final product.

So—what is a guy who’s never acted (but who has decided to act out an entire novel) to do?

Like anything and everything, I am a strong believer in the idea that anyone can do pretty much anything (well… maybe not perfectly, but certainly passably) with practice, practice, practice. Wy shouldn’t dramatic reading of a novel be any different?

To that end I’ve been practicing. I’ve read the first chapter of my novel into a microphone at least twenty times now, and each time I seem to find a tiny way to make it a little more interesting, bring a bit more depth to my performance, and kinda do something I was never ever trained to do.