If I Had a Hammer

 If I Had a Hammer

By Bobby Neal Winters

I received an email this week from a friend and former coworker who, among other kind things, told me my writing just “keeps getting better.”  It kind of made my day.  She knew me well enough to know this was the best thing to say. Let me explain.

I’ve taken up wood work.  When I first typed that sentence, “wood work” came out as “word work.”  Word work would be writing, wouldn’t it?

When Jean and I first got to town almost 33 years ago, we had very little, but we did have a VCR, and we kept getting tapes for it.  These things begin to pile up, so I decided to make a cabinet to hold VHS tape.  I did it using only wood, glue, and dowel pegs.  I may have used a couple of metal hinges and the associated screws; I forget.

It was horrible.  And we used it for many years.

By horrible I mean, I used cheap wood; I didn’t sand it; the glue was e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e.  The hinges were crooked.  

But it did function. And only recently did it go in the dumpster.

A lot of writing is the same way. It can be ugly, but still function. Yet when you get to a certain point in your craft as a writer you might wish to put it in the dumpster.

As I watch videos about woodworking, I have noticed there is a collection of techniques and tools they run to again and again.  They build a lot of boxes.  Almost everything is a box.

You want to make a chest of drawers?  Well, a drawer is a box without a top. The chest is just a box with strategically placed holes in the front.

It is more than that, of course, but that will serve for broad strokes.  Even the boxes have pieces, and there are techniques in putting the pieces together.

I’ve been watching a lot of Steve Ramsey who has the WoodWorking For Mere Mortals channel. In one of his earlier videos, he made a chessboard, which is something I now want to do.  When he put the finish on, he put something like six layers of varnish on, letting it dry in between each layer. He then began the process of sanding. He sanded it down through finer and finer grits, using more and more sophisticated techniques.  It looked like jewelry when he was done.

These days, he recommends spray-on varnish. And sometimes he says you needn’t do any finish-work at all.

It’s about the purpose.  You see, you can take his techniques for finishing the chessboard, and use it to make a table top, desktop, etc, and make that surface very, very nice.  But that sort of attention is not needed for everything.

Likewise, in writing, we have our tools.  We break things into pieces.  Writers don’t build boxes; writers build paragraphs. Instead of using glue, screws, and mortise-and-tenon, we use transitions, themes, and metaphors.

Writers and woodworkers both have to practice.  If I say, “Practice makes perfect,” someone will say, “Perfect practice makes perfect,” so instead I will say, “Practice gives us opportunities to get better.”

In the end, in whatever you do, you aren’t going to be perfect.  At least I’m not. I do hope in writing and woodworking to get better.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )