I'm sure that there are some folks who are immediately successful, but not me. I read somewhere that you should make a big stack of practice sandwiches. FMQ 45 minutes every day, and at the end of a month, you will have it down. This was my experience, and even after a month, I wasn't wonderful, but comfortable, with an even stitch length. The amount of time per day was good, so you didn't get tired, and the daily repetition gets the muscle memory ingrained. You can reuse the sandwiches by putting a new piece of fabric on top, so you don't need a new one every day. A hard thing for me was figuring out where to go next. I would strongly agree with the posters who said to doodle with paper and pencil a lot.