Learning Archery

Hello dear readers!

I’ve written before about “doing the thing” to help you better understand what you’re writing about. (Read that here). I recommend go out for a walk in the woods, wade through a cold mountain stream, eat different foods, and so on. Really be present in the moment and try to absorb the experience. What do you hear? What do you see? What do you smell? What do you taste? How are you feeling? There is no substitute for going and experiencing the things that your characters will be experiencing in your book in order to help inform your writing. I understand this won’t be applicable in all circumstances, but it’s well worth the effort when you can manage. If you can’t manage, find an expert and ask them.

Recently, I’ve taken an interest in archery. Why? Because one of my characters in A Songbird’s Tale learns to shoot a bow, of course!

I’ve played around with bows a tiny bit before, I had a compound bow when I was a kid, and then a few visits ago when I was in Tennessee, I got to mess around with a bow in Dustin’s back yard, but I’ve never had any formal training or coaching. I felt like this didn’t really cut it in terms of giving me the experience I wanted for knowing more about archery and learning how to shoot a bow.

Ooo, ahh, behold my prowess with the tiny bow. (And yes, now I know there is a lot wrong with this picture, haha!)

As someone who tries hard to ‘practice what I preach’, when I got back to Colorado, I went out and found myself an archery range and signed up to take a private lesson.

First time shooting, only shooting at a target about 10 yards away. Just trying to get the basics down.

Not only was it an absolute blast, I got instruction and tips from someone who really knows what they’re doing in a way that I can now take back to my book. Jaren will be able to give Songbird proper cues, and I have first hand experience on some of the mistakes beginners make. I can describe where you might get sore after an hour of shooting with bow that has a 30lb. draw, I know for a fact that for someone my size, trying to pull a bow with a 40lb. draw when I’ve never done it before and trying to aim and shoot and so on is very difficult. Unless you are extremely practiced and capable, the coordination of drawing arrows from your quiver, nocking it, drawing, aiming, and firing is WAY harder than it looks. (Thanks Hollywood Legolas for giving us all those super unreal expectations.)

Now, my guess is that a large percentage of my readers would never know the difference if the cues that Jaren gave Songbird were real, or made up. But for me, it matters. And for my readers who do know archery, the little details will a pleasant surprise and help with suspension of disbelief.

It’s super counter-intuitive to my Personal Trainer and Physical Therapy brain, but you actually want your elbow up when you draw and aim.

I’ve been shooting twice now, first time just went to the range with my aunt and tried some stuff out, second time we actually had a private lesson. I was shooting a recurve bow, and the poundage was really light, probably around 20 lbs. I’m told this is so you can just work on your form and be able to shoot for a longer time without completely wearing out your muscles by pulling a higher pound bow.

When you draw, you draw to your jaw bone type area, I’ve had a few different cues for hand placement, but the general idea is you draw to the side of your face. You can keep both eyes open, or just one eye. It turns out I almost don’t have a dominant eye, so aiming was a little tricky for me. When you release the arrow you want to just sort of let the string slip through your fingers. Some people like to think about pulling their draw hand back to touch their shoulder. Other people use a release to prevent any sort of spin on their bow string.

One thing that I found particularly interesting was that you can’t really aim directly at your target. You can look at the center of your target, but since you eye is actually above your arrow, when you look down the shaft of your arrow to aim, the tip of your arrow will be below where you want it to hit. The cue they were giving us during our lesson was to “aim the tip of the arrow at the bottom of the paper”. It’s weird and I don’t understand the physics behind all of it, but it works. For me I have to aim down and a little to the right of where I want me arrow to go.

My second time shooting (during our private lesson), I was eventually able to cluster my arrows fairly close together. If I remember correctly, this was either 10 yards (30 feet) or 15 yards away from the target.

Last weekend, I went out and tried my luck at an outdoor range. Let me tell, shooting outside with the sun in your face and trying to compensate for the wind is a COMPLETELY different ball game. Archery requires a ton of skill, and I can’t even imagine trying to hit a moving target that is also trying to hurt me or my party members. Epic fantasy is, well, epic. I know there are people out there who have practiced long and hard and are capable of doing just that, but man, the amount of hours that goes into getting that good… I have mad respect for those people.

Anyway.

Leaning new things is FUN. I definitely want to get a bow and practice this more. (Plus it won’t hurt to have a bow for when I cosplay Songbird some day, heh.) I may circle back to this in a few months to update and more things I’ve learned, but for now, this was a really good way to learn more about archery and how to teach a complete beginner how to shoot. I’m SUPER excited to incorporate what I learned into my book.

Till next time dear reader, give yourself permission to be a beginner and learn something new. <3 Tiff