Chapter 89: When the Instrument Plays You
When I was in high school, during the last century, I began learning to play a musical instrument and, inevitably, struggled. The jangle of keys and notes and embouchure confounded me, and the thought of being actually capable of producing music felt remote. One day, an older classmate who was already a terrific musician, listened to what surely sounded to him like honking and said, kindly and encouragingly, “right now the instrument is playing you. One day you will play the instrument.”
His insight has stayed with me, and over the last few weeks I found myself repeating it, time and again, as I sat down with my students for the final phase of their stories: a side-by-side edit. As I’ve written before, I don’t believe in having students produce what the wonderful Anne Lamott calls, “shitty first drafts,” that I rip to pieces in the hope that through all the cuts, reordering, queries, added words, deleted words, and what they experience as the wholesale evisceration of their writing, they will learn a thing or two.
Instead, I subscribe to the weekly submission of reporting memos (wherein the students are actually writing their stories, while not being self-conscious of the “writing”) followed by writing a scene from their story (to get them thinking of telling stories built on those foundational building blocks) to writing the first 100 words of their pieces.
But even through all that slow and patient build-up there is no way to avoid the inevitable: a full draft. Even though I have taken steps to avoid the “shittiness” of first drafts written before the writer knows what she or he wants to say, and have waited until after they have committed themselves to a direction in those first 100 words, and although they have in effect written much of their stories in their memos, they still have to write the damn thing.
I’ve done this enough times with enough students to conclude that in general those drafts come in at 75% of where they need to be. That is a good thing. After all, we’ve done a lot of the editing before they’ve written a word – in the proverbial “take off” stage of the process as opposed to the line edit of the “landing.”
Their drafts reflect the knowledge and authority built on their reporting, as well as a sense of what the story is about. In other words, I am not pulling out my hair asking, “what are you saying here?”
We open our laptops so we can work together on a single doc. We begin at Word One. I read the story out loud. By slowing things down we can hear how the writing sounds – whether a sentence or phrase works or whether it’s off by a word or two, and whether the paragraphs land in a way that closes one thought and carries the reader ahead. Because we do this in real time, because the students are not seeing the edits after-the-fact, they are welcome to push back and question and offer alternatives. Sometimes I will concede the point, especially if my edit undermines their voice.
The editing at this point is about the words, not the ideas, and is, as I assure them even as I change things, relatively minor – relative, that is, when compared to the big heave of an overhaul.
And yet. It is often the case that as strong as their stories are – and this class has been especially good – the drafts often come in a bit short, say by 25%. The writing lacks what I think of as a sense of ease. Or better said, command. The instrument is playing them. My job is to put them in a position where they can begin playing the instrument.
It makes little sense to start tinkering with words; that’s not going to get them and their where they need to be. Instead, I ask them to tell me their story. I do this in a very deliberate way: I ask that they only answer my questions, and volunteer nothing more. I am trying to help them create a narrative, so that their pieces will read like non-fiction short stories, which to my mind is the best way to think aspirationally about narrative journalism.
I want them to see what I am doing. I write a sentence and read it back. Then another and another. I keep reading it back, to listen for false notes, but also to allow them to see how I have used the only information they have reported to draw readers in and hopefully keep them.
I do this for perhaps the first quarter of the story. Then I stop. I have, I tell them, given you a template for how they can proceed on your own. I explain that were I to go through the entire story this way they will learn nothing. They have to see what happens when they do it themselves. I assure them I am not looking for perfection.
So why am I able to do what they struggle to accomplish? Experience, for starters. As I remind them, I’ve done this thousands of times, and so can determine what the story needs to get rolling and how to use combinations of words to get there. Yes, I am playing the instrument, even as they struggle against the instrument playing them.
But that feels awfully unsatisfying. I do not believe that writers need to wait until they have established command of their skills before they are ready to write. Writers need to write, and they need to write now. Still, there are things they cannot do, music they cannot play, at least not yet.
Like musicians and athletes, they are building muscle memory through repetition. There is a reason why great musicians still play scales and baseball players take daily batting practice. So that when it comes time to play, their hands will know just what to do, without them having to think about it.
Young writers do a lot of thinking, perhaps too much. They look at other writers and try to emulate what they do, even as they work hard to find their voices, their way of doing things. I remember as a young writer going through what might best be called Borrowing Phases (okay, copying) trying to sound like all the famous writers whose pyrotechnics – Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson – were so thrilling to read and so beyond my capabilities.
But then I’d read Roger Angell’s semi-annual baseball dispatches in The New Yorker and marvel at how over 8000 or 12000 words he didn’t seem to be breaking a sweat. He was in such command and the writing had an ease that I could only absorb in wonder. I could see Tom Wolfe working and it was fun to watch, much as falling in love hard and fast when you are young is thrilling, too. What Angell did felt years away, something I might one day achieve when I was comfortable with myself as a writer. Like being ready for something long term, even marriage.
My students work hard and throw themselves into their stories. They are wonderful to teach. I would very much like for each of them to possess that sense of command, that ownership of their voice, their instrument. It will come, in time.
For now, my advice to them is to keep the music simple. I don’t mean that tedious refrain of writing simple, declarative sentences, which can feel so deflating for young writers eager to do more.
Rather I mean writing with the knowledge that by dint of their reporting they have come back with the goods. They know the story. They have it, and so don’t have to try too awfully hard by embellishing their writing with adjectives and adverbs, with stylish curlicues, or the showy one-offs known in the trade as “writing for lines.” They want to be careful not to back into sentences with dependent clauses that are a tell-tale sign of writers not quite believing in themselves. Sometimes, I suggest, try writing without any commas. None – except for punctuating a quote.
There is no music without rhythm; melody alone will not do it. Learn the essential notes and begin playing them in combinations you can master. Add more. Build on it. Make the instrument yours.
Play it.
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We’ll be taking a couple of weeks off for the holidays and will be back on January 6th, in the new year. In the meantime, a safe, happy, joyful, healthy, and in all ways good holiday season.