Wednesday, November 07, 2007

writing my arpeggios: how one discipline informs another

... This freed me up to write short stories instead. “Do it every day for a while,” my father kept saying. “Do it as you would do scales on the piano.”—Anne Lamott

There is no place for rubbish and slop in the highly modern world of today’s fiction. Every sentence must pay, must somehow thrill. Every one.—Frederick Barthelme

One of my best writing teachers was my piano instructor at Calvin. As I played a piece for her one morning, she stopped me midway through, pointing with her pen and saying, “You played this note as if you didn’t care about it.”

I blinked. There’s a good reason for that, I thought testily, peering at the lousy eighth note and liking it even less than I had when I glossed over it a moment ago. It was a tiny pickup note to a lovely run on the next page—a springboard, a beat, that’s all. At least, that’s all it was to me. My teacher knew better, she pushed me to know better, and she was right.

Though that happened at least three years ago, I still think about that lesson a lot. I still see her pen hovering by my piano book and realize: it’s the best lesson on revising I’ve ever had. She wanted me to understand every note that I played, though I preferred to focus on the exciting bits, while neglecting the smaller notes.

No doubt, the same is true when I write!

I took piano for about half of my time at Calvin, and usually while also enrolled in a writing class, and I was always amazed at how the two disciplines overlapped. The more I read about writing and writers, the more I can see how this is true of other pursuits: one writer compares the writing life to running marathons, another to raising children, another to cooking.

For me, it’s piano. I’ve been writing and playing piano for as long as I can remember, so they go hand-in-hand naturally. In playing and writing, attention to details is crucial, and each has more details to attend to than I ever remember. The simplest piano piece goes far beyond getting the notes right, just as the simplest poem requires more than getting some flashy words down. How is it paced? Where are there crescendos and decrescendos? What balance of accents and slurs—what kind of tone does each note deserve? (My failure with the pickup note… I played it with a wimpy hand!)

Both disciplines are ravenous, gulping down all the time and energy I can give them. Both demand practice: time on the bench opposite one keyboard, time at the desk opposite another. Then the countless revisions, the submitting of my effort to my peers, whether in a studio group with piano, where I would listen to other students perform and then play my piece as well, or a peer edit group, where we marked up each others’ drafts and then talked about revision.

And the moment comes with a song or a written piece when it’s as good as it’s going to be, when I’m humming it in the shower or reciting phrases from it at breakfast, when I’m full of it, finished with it. And then it’s time to perform: time to turn the essay in, submit the short story, or play the memorized piece in front of professors.

... Which is when the gavel came down and ruled me a writer first, and a pianist second (or third, or fourth). I played only one piano jury, as a raw freshman at the end of my first semester. Absolutely terrified, I wobbled my way to the front of the Fine Arts Center auditorium and played three short pieces from memory at a gorgeous Steinway on the stage. (That Steinway was my consolation for the ordeal—such a wonderful piano!!) I could barely look out at the smiling professors (even though it went well enough), and then raced from the room.

I’d rather face the quieter terrors of sending manuscripts to an office in New York or Chicago or wherever some house is accepting submissions, would rather mess up quietly than publicly, would rather keep my hold on this shaky writing life. I leave music performance to braver people!

But that doesn’t stop me from playing around with a Clementi Sonatina in my free time…—jl

By the way: I’m still working on that concerto of mine, the novel, which is at 68,000 words. Whew! My longest sustained effort on a single piece of writing. I’m sure I’ve passed the halfway mark in the drafting process, but I can only guess at when the draft might be done. Will I be sending it off in December? Doubtful. I’m thinking it may be closer to mid-January, but we’ll see…

Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 11/07 at 08:43 PM
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