July 26, 2023
Down-time for the brain
My memoir, mentioned in the previous two posts, took me years to write and, during that time, I chewed on the question, How do I tell the difference between what compels me and what compels the reader?
I knew my intended audience: people who had gone through what I was writing about. But the knowledge that we had experiences in common wasn’t enough. I had to figure out what was important to them.
I’ll never forget the day the answer hit me, and I wasn’t even consciously thinking about the problem. Typically for what happens after I’ve allowed my brain to rest, this insight was exactly what I needed.
It was simply that readers are compelled by their feelings (in the case of the subject of my memoir). They are not interested in my feelings. It’s only where the two overlap that I can hope to engage them. Although this didn’t give me an inside look into their full experience, it still provided a starting point from which I could decide what to cut.
June 14, 2023
More wisdom from Barbara Tuchman
How do you tell a streamlined tale to engage readers and keep them turning the pages?
I’ve learned part of the answer from Barbara Tuchman, an excellent historian and equally skilled writer. Her advice is simple: Don’t tell all your good stories. Include only the minimum to make your point or further your narrative, and be ruthless in cutting all that great material you want to keep.
In her essay, “The Historian’s Opportunity,” she writes, “Ability to distinguish what is significant from what is insignificant is sine qua non. Failure to do so means that the point of the story, not to mention the reader’s interest, becomes lost in a morass of undifferentiated matter. What it requires is simply the courage and self-confidence to make choices and, above all, to leave things out.”
For years I struggled with this question of what to leave out, and finally began to see.
Next: What was that process?
February 8, 2023
Part Three: Discouragement with the process is part of writing
Writing is inherently a discouraging process. But try not to let this worry you. We all face the same difficulties.
Annie Dillard, best known for her 1975 Pulitzer Prize winner, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, is a successful writer. In her book, The Writing Life, she notes that writing a book is like building a house. Sometimes, when you’ve laid the foundation and built the walls, roof and partitions, you realize that more than half the structure must be torn down and rebuilt to new specifications. Imagine how much work this entails.
In one of my biggest struggles, I was trying to finish a memoir that a high-powered New York literary agent had agreed to look at. The project would not behave, and it took me so many years to figure out why, and fix the problem, that I lost my big chance.
The only comfort I can take from this episode is that, had I been able to finish the book, and she had found me a publisher, it probably would have hit the market at about the same time as the 2008 financial crisis. Media attention for my book wouldn’t have been available.
But I still have a lingering feeling that I missed an important opportunity.
July 25, 2013
Recognizing the Trade-Off, Part Two
As noted, problems in our writing pop out even when we try to improve it. For years I fought this reality in both cello playing and writing, and didn’t progress in my understanding of the problem until I began to think seriously about music pedagogy and the difference between various approaches.
All are designed to smooth the early path of technique and performance, and all have their limitations. For example, the Suzuki approach delays music-reading until the student is comfortable with the instrument and can play in tune and with good tone. By contrast, traditional study introduces basic technique and music reading all together at the beginning.
I really thought the founder of the movement, Dr. Shinichi Suzuki, had solved the problem of laying a strong foundation for good pitch and tone, until one of my junior high cello students told me, “Suzuki students can’t read music. In school orchestra, my Suzuki-trained stand partner watches me and copies what I do, a split second after I do it. It looks like she’s reading the page of music, but she’s actually faking it.”
This was an early clue that there’s always a trade-off. With the Suzuki approach, in pursuing good technique first, the important question of how to teach music-reading was not solved but delayed.
Music of Writing 