Is this anything?
It’s the title of Jerry Seinfeld’s book in which he chronicles
the jokes he’s written since the 1970s. It’s the question he asks himself, and fellow comics, when he comes up with a bit.
He writes that upon first seeing a comedian when he was in his teens he wondered: "How did the comedian know that what they said would get such huge laughs from a crowd of total strangers?”
During the pandemic writing was particularly hard for two reasons: First, so many ideas come being where the action is, whether the action is a coffee shop or a football game, a grocery checkout line or sitting next to a stranger on an airplane. And during the past two years there was very little action.
The second thing that made it difficult was the lack of feedback.
Ideas come and go, but how do you know, “Is this anything?”
I am a romantic at heart. I like to think writing at a cabin in the woods or a pub in London or with an espresso on the table helps stir the imagination so words fall to the page. But as I complete another trip around the sun it’s clearer to me that it’s often not about the inspiration, but the perspiration.
In the new Beatles documentary Get Back, the bandmates are tasked
with writing and recording 14 songs in a few weeks to perform as a televised
concert. Spoiler Alert, they don’t get all the songs completed, but it shows
how the work is done, they need to get their butts in their seats and play and write
and rhyme until something appears. And it’s damn hard work.
When they are working on the song Something John
tells George just to make up words until it works. And so the line, “Something
in the way she moves, attracts me like no other lover” started out as “Something
in the way she moves, attracts me like a cauliflower.”
I remember a train ride to New York a few years back when I found myself across from poet Calvin Trillin. On the table between us was a pad of
paper, a pen and, wait for it, a rhyming dictionary.
And I thought to myself, isn’t that cheating?
But when Stephen Sondheim, the great Broadway composer and lyricist,
died in November a slew of interviews re-appeared where he said one of his best
tools is a rhyming dictionary and a 1946 edition of Roget’s Thesaurus.
Seinfeld said he's afraid to stop writing every day, fearful he will somehow lose the ability. He puts up a big wall calendar and then marks an X for each day he writes
and then after a while his goal is to just not break the chain. He said it’s not
about being efficient, the “right way is the hard way.”
Paul Simon in his new audio book Miracle and Wonder, talks about where his songs come from. While there is discussion of the hits, he also discusses the misses. Like the time he heard Viola da Gamba and then wondered what it
would be like to record with a Theorbo. So he found someone who played it, he flew to Paris to
record with them only to realize after a few days that he, “got nothing, nothing that I wanted." No magic, no song, no tune, no rhythm.
“It’s all trial and error and there’s no reason to be upset
about the errors,” he said.
I wanted to name my book, "At least one person besides me, liked these stories," because it is filled with stories that were published by someone besides me. When you are alone in a room writing it is very gratifying to have an editor somewhere on this planet read them, tell you they are worth publishing and sharing them with others.
This book represents thousands of hours of work and at this point more than 300 rejections over the course of the pandemic. But still we search for a sentence that works. A phase that means somethings. A connection with another person. As Hemingway said, "One true sentence."
Robert Frost said poetry should begin in "delight" and end in "wisdom".
I think short stories are the same.
I hope you find delight, if not wisdom, in these pages.
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