I've Written a Book That Nobody Wants to Publish

I've written a book that nobody wants to publish. Admittedly, that's slightly unfair because I haven't spent the last ten years collecting rejection letters from every publisher in Britain, and I'm still at a relatively early stage of trying to find a home for it. Nevertheless, I've discovered something that probably won't come as much of a surprise to anyone who has tried to get a book published: writing one and persuading somebody to publish it are two entirely different things.

The strange part is that I never particularly wanted to write a book in the first place - what I wanted to do was organise the way I teach.

Thirty Years of Accumulated Ideas

I've been teaching guitar for more than thirty years, and during that time I've accumulated an enormous number of ideas about practice and learning. Some came from my own playing, some from reading about how we learn, but most came from sitting opposite students and trying to work out why they couldn't do something.

Over time, certain patterns kept appearing so I began developing particular ways of solving particular problems. I started recognising the same learning difficulties in completely different students, sometimes separated by decades in age and playing entirely different styles of music. Gradually, what had once been instinctive teaching became something I could describe.

Eventually I realised that there was a structure underneath it and that structure became The Four Stages of Practice: A Guitarist's Guide to Mastery.

And once I started writing it all down, the project became much bigger than I expected.

The Book Became a System

The original intention was to write about practice, because I've always thought that musicians receive remarkably little instruction in how to practise effectively. We're taught what to play, shown how to play it and then sent away to practise. That final part can involve an extraordinary amount of trial and error.

As I started trying to explain my own approach properly, I realised that the book needed practical teaching tools alongside it. That led to the development of Skill Maps, practice methods, diagnostic tools and eventually a Guitar Practice Toolbox.

At some point I looked at everything spread across my desk and realised I hadn't just written a book - I'd developed a teaching system. That sounds horribly grand when I write it down, and I'm quite aware of that.

Perhaps I'm Completely Wrong

There's an unavoidable problem when you create something yourself: you're probably the least objective person in the world when it comes to judging whether it's any good. But I think my system works because I use it every day.

I can see the difference it makes to my teaching and to the way my students practise. Ideas that took me years to understand can sometimes be communicated to a student in a few minutes because I now have a language for explaining them.

But every author presumably thinks their book is worth reading, otherwise they wouldn't have gone to the trouble of writing it.

Perhaps a publisher will look at mine and think, "This is nothing new." maybe somebody has already developed a better version of it - or what if I've spent several years creating an extraordinarily elaborate answer to a question nobody was asking. All of those possibilities have occurred to me. I don't think they're true, but then I wouldn't, would I?

The Problem With Being a Guitar Teacher From Surrey

There's another possibility, though, and it's one I've become increasingly interested in.

What happens when an educational idea develops outside the places where educational ideas are normally expected to come from?

I'm not an academic. I don't work for a university or an examination board. I don't run a national music organisation and I don't have a research department behind me.

I'm a guitar teacher working from a studio in Surrey.

My evidence comes largely from more than thirty years of doing the job, watching students learn, changing the way I teach when something doesn't work and gradually building a methodology from what I've observed.

That kind of knowledge is difficult to package.

In academia, an idea can be supported by research and published through academic channels. Inside a large educational organisation, there are existing routes through which a new teaching approach can be developed, tested and promoted.

If you're an independent teacher who thinks you've discovered something useful, the route is rather less obvious.

You write it down, then you try to persuade somebody to read it.

Why I Think It Matters

In the previous two articles on this blog, I've written about something I think is missing from guitar education: a clearer curriculum of underlying skills, and a better way of seeing what a student is actually learning. What matters for this article is that I believe the system has applications beyond my own teaching studio.

I can see how it could help guitar teachers diagnose problems more accurately. I can see how it could be used in teacher training. I can see how Skill Maps could help schools understand the progression taking place within instrumental lessons without dictating what music teachers should use.

Whether anybody else agrees is, of course, another matter - which is precisely why I'd like it published. I don't want my ideas protected from criticism, I want them exposed to it.

If there are weaknesses in the Four Stages, I want somebody to find them. If parts of the system can be improved, I want them improved. If another teacher takes one of my methods and discovers a better way of using it, that's interesting to me and I want to hear from them.

An educational idea becomes useful when other people start doing things with it.

So What Happens Now?

For the moment, I continue teaching. I use the system every week, alter things when they don't work and occasionally discover that something I've been confidently telling students for years needs to be reconsidered.

The book prose continues to evolve as a result.

I'll also continue approaching publishers, although I'm beginning to understand why so many authors eventually decide to publish their own work. The traditional route requires somebody else to believe in the idea before readers have had the opportunity to decide whether they believe in it themselves.

Perhaps somebody will eventually take a chance on The Four Stages of Practice.

Perhaps I'll publish it myself.

Perhaps five years from now I'll look back at this article and be mildly embarrassed by how convinced I was that I'd developed something important. I can live with any of those outcomes.

What I don't want to do is spend thirty years learning something about teaching, finally work out how to explain it, and then leave it sitting on my computer because nobody gave me permission to put it out into the world.

So I've written the book. Now I suppose I'd better find some readers.