The Case for Practicing in Public
How Repetition Changes the Weight of Writing in Public
My middle child loves soccer. Spends hours outside dribbling and chasing and juggling and shooting. His Dad is a former professional player and youth coach, and so naturally he feels that instructor tug with his own son.
My son relishes the times when they play together. But when his Dad falls into instructor mode, it just as often ends in tears.
Not because he is demanding or impatient. Not because the skills are out of reach, or the play lacks fun.
No. My son just doesn’t like to practice in public.
He doesn’t like attention in the development stage, in the learning phase, in the inevitably messy, trying-and-failing-and-trying-again phase.
I know this because I will nearly always find him the next day, outside by himself, practicing the very skill his Dad tried to teach him. Over and over and over again.
Until a few days later, my son announces: “Dad, come see what I can do!”
And then he shows off.
No Single Piece Has To Carry So Much
It’s a particular personality that likes to practice in public: it’s hard, vulnerable, nerve-wracking, and uncertain.
I, like my son, am a planner, a preparer, a born private practicer.
And yet, for the past four and a half years, I’ve written and published Pen to Pieces, my personal email newsletter and Substack, every month.
Though my audience is small, sharing my words and work has been an act of defiance against discomfort every 28-31 days.
This is what I’ve learned:
Writing for a public audience is an act of vulnerability, regardless of what you write.
It means repeatedly putting yourself, your ideas, and your words out there. It is developing the craft of argument, of openings, of storytelling, of audience engagement, of organization, of style and voice out in the open. Again and again and again.
When I started, the weight of each piece felt too heavy to hold, too much pressure to sit on one small bit of prose.
Over time, though, with more issues under my belt, each individual piece started to look small in the overall collection of essays, one thought intermingled with a bunch of others.
It became easier to hit publish, easier (though never easy) to sit with the silence or occasional negativity that followed, and, most dramatically, to transition to the next month, next idea, next story to tell.
Instead of a make-or-break moment each month as I confronted the final piece, I found each individual one carried less pressure.
And that change in weight created room: for experimenting with less perceived risk, for trying new structures with less pressure, for playing with style and form and function.
I’ve developed, adjusted, refined, retraced, and reiterated ideas and arguments over time in parallel to my growth as a human, as a writer, and in conversation with my audience.
All in the public eye.
The point isn’t that after enough repetition I stopped caring about what I published.
It’s that with time no single piece has to carry quite so much.
There will be another one.
Idea Change When They Meets an Audience
I’ve been thinking about this while reading David M. Perry’s The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook. Perry talks about the how of public scholarship: pitches, editors, publishing processes, opportunities, and inevitable pitfalls.
He also makes the case for practicing in public.
Whether it’s weekly blogging or monthly pitches or biannual public talks or any other number of ways to engage general audiences with your expertise, integrating a public writing program into your career takes the discipline and vulnerability of walking an uncertain path with eyes on you.
For experts considering a trade nonfiction book, this matters long before there is a proposal or a manuscript.
A book idea never starts and ends in your head.
It develops in contact with other people.
Writing for general audiences gives you opportunities to put an argument into the world and see what happens. To discover what readers already understand and what they don’t. What questions they ask. What examples make an abstract idea suddenly concrete. What stories make them feel seen and heard.
And, critically, it changes you as a writer.
For experts, writing for a general audience can mean becoming a beginner again—not in your subject, but in how you communicate it. You may know the material deeply. Your readers don’t. They don’t necessarily share your knowledge, your assumptions, your conventions, or even your reasons for believing the subject matters. Writing for them requires that you learn to see your expertise from the outside.
You can think carefully about those readers. You can prepare. You can develop the book privately.
But those skills must also develop through public practice: by putting an idea in front of people, writing the essay, giving the talk, making the argument, seeing what happens.
And then doing it again.
The book idea grows, and so does the writer.
Books Don’t Develop in Isolation
None of this means that every public piece needs to become part of your eventual book. Or that you need a large platform, a viral essay, or years of public writing before you can write one.
It means that a book for general readers is not simply an idea developed privately and then delivered, fully formed, to the public.
The book idea can grow in public, too.
Most of us fall somewhere on the spectrum in our comfort level with public engagement: from uncomfortable and anxious to at-home and attention-seeking.
There’s no wrong or right way to start.
Wherever you fall, and whatever your ultimate goals, the point is to keep pitching and keep publishing and letting your ideas develop through that contact.
And maybe, if you’re like me and my son, to intermingle those public practice sessions with the freedom and confidence that come from practicing when no one is watching.
Whether it’s writing or soccer shots.