Letters to the Editor: Effortless Mastery — Drill It Until the Effort Falls Out

Letters to the Editor.
Editor: "Hi Mike. Chapter 11 — My Water, Again. What made you pick this one?"
Mike: "My water again is a good one. I like how he has to work it over and over until he suddenly realised how easy it is when he regains the ability."
Editor: "The thing I noticed re-reading it — the failure isn't in Shane. It's in his method. He keeps sending the arrow down with the dorsal, watching it dissolve at the deep blue, and thinking 'deeper, smaller, deeper.' He's treating it like a distance problem. Then the line: 'It had nothing to do with distance — it was about what I could generate from wherever I stood.'
That's not a power-up. He doesn't get stronger. He just stops looking at the wrong thing. And in Chapter 3 he already told Mila this — 'the harder I try or the more serious I get, the less it seems to work.' So Chapter 11 is Shane forgetting his own lesson and having to find it again the hard way.
Is that the real-life thing under it for you? That regaining an ability is less about effort and more about remembering you already had it?"
Mike: "We all have this. There is something you know you can do, but you just have to drill it and drill it until the effort and the think just falls out of it. Then it becomes effortless."
Editor: "That's the whole chapter, then — the drill isn't wasted. Every dissolved arrow is a rep. And when it finally clicks, the first thing he does isn't the task. It's a spool of water thrown up into the sky 'just for fun.' That's the tell. The play comes back before the work does.
And then the dorsal leader launches out of the water — mirroring it. Nobody says a word.
Which leaves the last thing: Gary standing there. He's been watching the whole time and Shane never noticed. Then 'Wicked. It looks like you have found your space, my Lord.' Was Gary always going to be there at the end, or did he just walk in while you were writing?"
Mike: "I think I had the cheeky thought at the start of that chapter. How many times do we do something pure genius and nobody sees it. It feels good to have a witness."
Editor: "That's the EP for me. Chapter 11 is a man alone at the rail, drilling something over and over till the effort drops out of it and it goes back to play — and just as it does, he looks up and there's a mate who saw the whole thing. Effortless mastery, and a witness. Good chapter, Mike."
More chapters, more letters, coming soon. — Mike
This series is built from real editorial conversations behind Lord of Water — the raw material, unpolished. New here? Read Chapter 1 free at lordofwater.com/chapter-1/