Giving Away the Store, Part 9: Go Back

Go back can mean a lot of things for a writer. It can mean go back to your last draft and try to improve it. It can mean go back with a family member or friend to an episode you experienced in common to get their take on those moments. It can mean go back to restaurant or museum, or sports center you like to compare experiences then with now. In this post, I note three other go-backs that I do periodically. They usually inspire some creativity.

1. Go back to your roots. For me, going back to my roots means two places: the Bronx, New York, where I grew up, and Mgarr, Malta, where my parents grew up. When I go to the Bronx, the James Monroe Housing Projects in particular, I could swear I see my ten-year-old self racing friends around the apartment buildings, playing in the softball field, and hanging on the bench with my childhood friends. When in Mgarr, as I'll be next month for the eleventh time in my life, I see the police station where my father served as a police officer. I see the fields where my mother, as the eldest of 11 children, fetched water from the well for my grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Stories are behind my every step in these places.

2. Go back to something you've read. I am fortunate to have read books like John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea to my grandson Delano. These are fiction pieces I read in high school or college, and as I read them a half century later to my grandson between his eighth and tenth years, I not only connected with him—always a good thing—but I get new perspectives as a senior and from Delano, 10 years younger than I was when I read them. There's a story somewhere there, right?  

3. Go back to something you've written. I can go back 52 years in my journals, and I often do. I am the same person I was back then, but I am not too. My attitudes and inclinations, even my politics, have changed. I am less hopeful than I was then, but also less anxious. I was angrier then, and I am more tolerant now. Some people who know me may read this and disagree, but what matters to a writer is his own mindset. Regardless of how I feel or felt, I can tap into a reservoir of ideas from those notebooks. And I do.

Giving Away the Store, Part 8: Review Your Entertainment

An easy way to keep writing is to compose reaction pieces of any movie, play, concert, ballet, or art exhibit you might attend, or any book or article you might read. Even a song you hear on the radio, or your music player will do. Forget about the rules of what should appear in a reaction piece. This isn't school. You can compare what you just read to another story, including a personal one. You can explain what a song you just heard means to you. You can note how a painting reminds you of someone you love. There are no rules. This activity is for you, as a means of kickstarting the writing process or  recording an experience. Nobody's business but yours.  

You can find any point of entry into such writing. The more personal, the better. Say you heard a new version of a song this morning that struck you in some way. For instance, I remember the first time I heard Ray Charles sing "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning!" by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. Before that moment in the early 1980s, when I was preparing a family meal, I thought of that tune as little more than a decent Broadway show opener. But when Ray's voice burst through the radio in his singular way, soaring high and descending fast like an eagle after its prey, my breath was taken away. I just had to stop cooking and write down some notes about how Ray Charles can recreate the most ordinary tunes into soulful celebrations of life. I've heard his rendition hundreds of times since as a pick-me-upper. 

More than once I experienced watching a play I had already read that astonished me because of its staging and acting. I can think of Colleen Dewhurst performing as Josie Hogan in Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1974, her husband George C. Scott playing Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman the next year, and F. Murray Abraham as Krapp in Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape just a week ago—a full half-century later. Their performances were so special that I was sure they added lines to the original script. But upon reviewing the scripts once I got home, I realized I was wrong. That's the power of a great performance. The actors make you hear the lines for the first time.

I could write similar stories about musicians. The first time I heard Billie Holiday sing her forlorn rendition of "Love for Sale," or Stephane Grappelli bend notes on his violin for "Nuages," or Michel Camilo's piano thundering through "On Fire." I could name many more musicians. Or artworks, like when I first saw Chuck Close's "Phil," a 6-by-9-foot black-and-white acrylic on canvas portrait of Philip Glass. Or when I first stepped into the Museum of Modern Art room dedicated to Claude Monet's giant water lily paintings. Or my impression of monumental books like Call It Sleep by Henry Roth, The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig.

Writing summary reviews is also a good way of compensating for any guilt you might feel over watching too many sitcoms. Write about everything you watch. You'll find a gem in your notes just waiting for you to expand into a poem, story, play, or essay. Just do it.