Unless you carry about a collection of jazz discs in your
car or connect your iPod touch to the radio system on your car, jazz input is
limited, the one or two available sources reliant on scheduling hours. Not a
serious problem, not when KUSC, one of the major classical outlets, is
available throughout the central coast area.
The frustration is not being able to hear what you want,
when you want it, which is a good analogy for the music you hear in your mind’s
ear, classical or jazz, which you have absolutely no ability to reproduce,
neither in writing or performance on anything more sophisticated than a kazoo.
The frustrations (plural because there are many) inherent in
transforming an idea from concept into story, from skittering, so-what story to
meaningful story, have haunted you like the ghost of his father haunting
Hamlet, more or less since you were of that Hamlet’s age.
Within the intervening years from you achieving Hamlet’s
age, then moving well beyond it, you have contributed your share of wadded
discards of attempts, on occasion achieving an intellectualized vision of what
might help, at other times understanding the need to convey the necessary
feelings, at yet other times a combination of both.
Your placement in the evolving scale of technology, from
typewriter to electric typewriter to early generation computer, to now allows
you a vision between the piles of crumpled pages and the code names you give
files to remind you when they were written and, thus, what evolution in the
process they might have made.
Among the elephants in the living room are the frustrations
of getting your own ideas captured so that they may be studied, fed, enhanced,
brought to some degree of satisfactory conclusion.
This elephant, which you will call the personal writing
elephant, is joined by the teaching elephant; you are seen by some as one who
knows which firefly to snatch from the sky, where to put it, and how to feed it
while it is in captivity. There comes a
time when the student becomes aware that what you can do is not an alchemy
which can be learned once for all time. After
you experience this realization from the student, you are faced with their
added disillusion when they discover that each new project requires a new
alchemy, one that works for that project alone.
A colleague confided in you this past week that he believes
you have forgotten more than he knows.
You responded to the effect that you are never sure you have forgotten
enough. His reaction to that convinced
you there is a splendid basis for continuing friendship.
Another elephant you sometimes forget, then stumble over on
your way out of the living room is the editorial elephant, coming into play
often when a fresh and viable approach to the project at hand seems to have
come from nowhere, but is in reality quite experience based. The problem with the work is not the work
itself but where the work begins and sometimes where the work ends. The sigh you hear from the one who has been
edited precedes the author’s sense of being tired of the project, not wanting
to do another draft. You understand that
as a kind of defensiveness; it is the equivalent of driving on the freeway and
experiencing someone make a sudden lane shift directly in front of you; it is
your space, your vision, being trespassed, threatened, invaded.
Music to the editor’s ears:
“I don’t have it in me to do another draft.”
You are, of course, being ironic. You appreciate actors such as the late Paul
Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Glenn Close, and Meryl Streep, who think nothing of
doing another take and another and another, in complete disavowal of
perfection. As there is no failure, only
dreadful grasp of the idea (which may not have been all that good), there is no
perfection, only the opportunity to bring something fresh to a story.
Writing in this sense has nothing to do with success or
failure, only an opportunity to capture a falling star or a shard of
lightning. Such coins as there are in
your pocket come from your awareness of this and your ability to share it.
This philosophy would work a good deal better if the only
elephant in the living room were your own writing and your own relationship to
it. Those two bumps over there. Teaching.
Editing. They figure in the
calculus as well to the point where, the longer you can go without being
overcome by one or more of the frustrations associated with teaching and
editing, the greater the likelihood you will also go a tad longer without the
frustrations getting to be elephants within your own work. Then the next draft will be from curiosity
and enthusiasm rather than defensive dreariness.
No comments:
Post a Comment