Singing Lessons and the Power of Prep

Don't worry, this isn't about finding my voice through singing

Mar 20, 2025

Classroom at singing school — All I wanted in life was to be Shirley Manson, but this will do

I signed up for singing lessons because I love karaoke and wanted a hobby I could not monetize, no matter how hard I tried. If God had given me the ability to choose a natural born talent, I would have picked singing. I would have pursued a life as a musician, knowing full well the euphoria I feel whenever I have a mic in front of me and a willing crowd. Plus, the obligation of an international tour where I can put on my rider luxury items like “Landeau chocolate cake”? A dream!

Alas, I was born with only an ok voice. I can carry a tune fine but no one is going to be moved by my angelic timbre or powerhouse vocals. I do best with singers who are better known for their fierceness than musical prowess—Cher, Madonna, that girl who sings “Friday”. In fact, one of the things I learned about my own singing voice through my lessons is that I’m actually pretty good at following an established singer’s interpretation of the song. I know when to enter, when to warble the “ohs”, when to take a deep breath to hit a higher note. But take away the vocals and only give me an instrumental version of the song and I end up a little lost.

So no, this isn’t a post about how taking singing lessons taught me to find my voice as a writer. If I do have a natural born talent is that voice, that ineffable quality every writer should have that distinguishes them from others, has always come easy to me. I pride myself on the fact that I could probably identify my own writing from a lineup and so could many of my readers or audience members who have heard me perform. Mostly because of my typos, I kid, I kid. We are dealing with reality, instead of metaphor, so there is no clean parallel between finding my singing voice as a way to find my writerly voice. Different mediums! I don’t have the talent to make a song special.

Which isn’t to say singing lessons haven’t taught me anything about who I am as a writer and, by extension, a creative person.

Heading to my first class at the friendly and low-key singing school near me, I thought I had an idea of how my Tuesday evenings were going to be. I envisioned a space where our instructor would lead us through a couple of vocal exercises and maybe correct our breathing, before spending the bulk of the two hours singing and harmonizing. I got all the ratios wrong. We spent one class playing around with breathing and posture, placing our hands on different parts of our body to notice where oxygen traveled, where it got stuck. We spent another class walking around the room, clapping our hands to different rhythmic patterns. Most of our classes are focused on scales and modulating our mouths, often exaggerating its movements. Lyrics are “fey-fey-fey”, “kiu-kiu-kiu,” “pa-pa-pa”.

We are on Week 10 of Básico 1 and we still spend about three-fourths of the class on vocal exercises and breathing techniques, with a few minutes devoted to music theory. We sing songs in the last half hour, mostly Latin American pop stalwarts I missed when living in the States because they are not reggaetón or rancheras. We go over the same troublesome spots, until all ten of us are in unison.

Frustrating? A little. I do wish sometimes we could spend the entire class just yodeling our butts off. Productive? Actually, yes. I feel my vocal chords loosening with every “fa-fa-fa”. I notice how much farther my volume goes when I intentionally breathe through my stomach instead of my throat. I can hit higher notes more easily, gradually working up to that scale. I can’t ever seem to relax my shoulders, but I’m working on it.

I’ve been thinking about exercises as an integral part of being an artist, in the most inclusive definition of the word. Whenever I’m in a writing workshop that forces us to complete in-class exercises, I die a little inside. I have so little time as it is? Can’t you give us something that is directly conducive to a finished product? is my knee-jerk reaction. What is using three unrelated objects in a random scene going to do for my manuscript? I fume. This prompt sounds very romcom and I want to write my very important essays, I sour. Too often, I’ve spent that time doing literally anything else which is code word for looking at my phone. I’m usually skeptical of authors who talk about writing backstories for characters that never make it into the manuscript or writing scenes from different angles to see what works. But, if I’m being honest, they’re the authors with published novels while I’m still here, languishing in a pretty unremarkable career.

I’ll never be a great singer but showing up weekly to get feedback from my instructor and practicing at home has made me a better one. NEWSFLASH: WORKING ON SOMETHING CONSISTENTLY PAYS OFF. I have too often relied on whatever comes easy to me because I’m impatient and have a big head. Thankfully, I’m also self-aware, and 42, and scared of my own mortality, and have hit that rock bottom, the kind where you realize you’ve been doing it all wrong for far too long lol. So here I am, a good 15 years after starting my writing career, wondering: What if I open myself to the idea of warming-up my writing chops? What can exercises do for me? What if I need to pre-write in order to actually write? Which is another way of asking, when did I stop thinking of writing as discovery? Probably around the time I tied it to professional goals and, inevitably, to monetary gain.

I’ve started working on a novel, a good four years after the worst writing rejection I’ve ever experienced. One of the biggest lessons I took with me is that I never want to spend seven years working on a draft ever again. The other lesson I learned was that there are no shortcuts to writing. I’m a Gemini so I’m comfortable with contradictions hehe but what I mean is this: cutting away the pre-writing, the exercises, the pages and pages that will never see the light of day is not going to get me to a better story quicker. What is going to get me there quicker is putting in the actual hours of work. Showing up to loosen my writing muscles, put words down intentionally, and practice, practice, practice to get to final, satisfying note.

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