Fishing

There are, very broadly speaking, two kinds of art.

Dance, music, acting, cuisine, that sort of art exists in time and space together.  Once the time is gone, they vanish, leaving nothing behind except witness in the minds of the audience.  Those arts begin and end in practice, because performance and practice are the same.  The only difference is witness.  So repetition is key to these arts, at start and finish.

The other sort of art begins in practice, meets opportunity, and leaves behind a record that exists in space.  Writing, painting, sculpture, and photography are examples of this.  They leave behind a record of their creation; it's the record itself that we admire in these arts.

The common element in all arts is practice.

Art requires endless repetition with absolute dedication.  Only once the form has gone beyond memorization and has become a response in the flesh itself can brilliance occur.  This repetition is, of course, called practice.  You can no more stop practicing mid-career than a bird can stop flying in midair.
I play the ukulele badly, because I haven't played any one song more than six or seven hundred times.  And also because I have no talent.  But even without talent, enough practice may allow me to play proficiently.  So in ten or twenty years I will be able to play a few songs well enough to listen to.

On the other hand, I have a little talent at drawing and writing, and have practiced both of those forms a great deal, so am adequate at them for my purposes.  And I'll get better with continued effort.

Clearly, the common element in all arts is practice.  Practice alone will give you skill, even without innate aptitude; you can be a craftsman.  Talent is a facility for absorbing the rewards of practice -- it can make you a master.  Genius is a different thing; a genius is born with a lifetime of practice already inside them.

So as it happens, I'm not any good at the arts that exist in time alone.  I can cook a little, and play the ukulele poorly, and that's it.  I'm better at the permanent arts.  Here's here the 'fishing' part comes in.

Say you're a dancer.  You practice until the entire choreography is built into your body, refining and perfecting each motion, always striving to make each performance the best.

It's not the same if you're making a drawing or a photograph or writing something.  Then opportunity enters into it.  When I was a kid, we all knew where the good fishing spots were.  But the kids who caught the best fish were the ones who spent all their time on the water.  That's opportunity.  It's why, many days, I will sit at my desk and get very little written.  But I'm there all the damn day.  Because you never know when that big fish is going to swim by.  If you don't have a bait in the water you will not catch it.  That's taking the opportunity.

So if you're ready when inspiration strikes -- when the image appears, when your hand communicates onto the paper or the words come -- in that moment the permanent art can be created.  In that sense, practice is keeping yourself in readiness for when the occasion is right.

A Novel Idea

Somebody write this: a guy lives in Manhattan.  He's completely paranoid and hostile, can't form relationships.

And then the old guy from downstairs in his building dies, and it turns out the dead guy wrote our protagonist into his will: the paranoiac gets his old dog.

So the paranoiac ends up with the dog.  And the kicker is, the neighbor united them because they're both paranoiacs.  The dog is totally neurotic in exactly the same ways the paranoid dude is.  It was a 'fuck you' from the grave.

So at first they're incredibly antagonistic, man and dog, working to passive-aggressively destroy each other.  But when they go on walks, the dog freaks out, and the paranoiac freaks out, and it turns out they're actually an ideal pair because they're afraid of the same things and they can be miserable all the time.

So they end up loving each other, in their way, and in some small degree they heal.

The coda is the dog eventually dies, and the paranoiac is completely out to sea, and then somebody he came to know a little bit -- probably a veterinarian -- reaches out to him and suggests he get a puppy.  And we end with him trying to decide if he can make that commitment, knowing that this time it will be a different personality, but still a dog, and he has come to trust dogs, at least.

I don't know if it's a short story or a novel or a screenplay.  Maybe a screenplay.  Write it and we'll split the money.