I had a conversation the other night with a man who’d been a puppeteer for years. In the course of the conversation he said that he’d never picked up marionettes because he thought they were too hard to learn. I’ve heard this before. I hear it a lot, in fact, that marionettes are too hard to learn for most people.

I don’t agree.

My feeling is that it’s just as hard and takes just as much time to master a marionette as it does to truly master a rod puppet. BUT in the beginning stages of learning, a marionette looks much worse than a rod puppet. To use a music analogy. Anyone can make sound on a piano the first time the touch it. Not everyone can make sound on, say, an oboe. That doesn’t mean that an oboe is takes longer to learn, it’s just that the piano is more forgiving to beginners.

I think puppets are the same way. Anyone can pick up a rod puppet and wiggle it, but to do it well takes the same time and attention as a marionette. People just give up faster because the beginning stages can be discouraging. And I don’t think that it’s really that they are more inept with marionettes, but that the mistakes are more obvious.

My parents have a recording of me at the age of five playing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” on the violin. I was not good. A year later, they recorded me again. I was still not good. I wound up playing the violin for seventeen years and got better.

I’m thinking that just because it sounds or looks ugly the first time, doesn’t mean you should stop trying. Once I got past the beginning errors, marionettes became as easy as a rod puppet.