If you love Art, Music, or whatever then cut loose, cuz... Dave Grohl told us to

I was watching Dave Grohl being interviewed by Sam Jones (Off Camera with Sam Jones). I love that interview show. I highly recommend it if you love art, music, writing, acting. The Robert Downey, Jr. interview was also very good.

Sam Jones' Off Camera with Dave Grohl

I liked Dave Grohl's attitude and things he had to say, I guess in being a purest about things. For instance, screw the computers "enhancing" your music. Just, do it.

It made me wish I had been a musician. I actually had wanted to and well, it just never worked out. I seemed to have a talent for writing and so, I'm a writer. 

One of the last things Dave said in the interview was to just do it.

The Who's Keith Moon

As he put it and to paraphrase, "When Keith Moon was playing, beating on his drums, do you think he had mapped that all out? He was just banging the hell out of those drums. When I first started out, I was working at a furniture store and I wanted people to hear me play. I would just beat the hell out of those drums and when I walked out, people would think, wow, he really played the hell out of those drums." (remember that wasn't a direct quote, but you get the gist of it)

That got me to thinking. First about how easy it is for musicians in a way. You play something, those you want to hear it, hear it, even those you don't know are there, or in a different room hear it. If it's good they will be drawn to it. Gee, how nice, how easy. Whether or not they even want to hear it they could inadvertently end up liking it. Same with visual arts, you just show it in a single glance and viola, they like it or not, but they've seen it, experienced it. Try that with a poem, a short story, a novel. Yeah, good luck. Even videos are easier.

Getting people to read your writings is real a bitch. Trust me. Then if they do they usually don't know what to say in response (unlike with a song, oh, "that's good!", or "oh, that sucks!"). It's very, frustrating.

I started playing guitar in second grade. You play a song and if you played well, one could just tell, people liked it. Even if they weren't listening, or wanting to, they really had no choice. Sound, happens. Try that with a short story. 

It's can be kind of a miserable life, being a writer. Until you can get someone to read it, and start paying attention, until you get a following. Then it becomes easier of course, but then the other difficulties pop up.

No, this really isn't supposed to be a bitch session. I just wanted to get to a point where I could say what I wanted to say. And that was this....

What Dave said to just play the hell out of it! Not to overthink it, not to artificially manipulate it...in a way that is what we do with writing. We write it, someone reads it, maybe an editor because if you want your stuff read, pay an editor or reader and it gets read.

I started to think about this. Writing isn't music. So how can I turn what Dave said toward my writing?

Because I still have a full time day job in order to pay the bills I have to schedule my writing times for when I have the time, energy, creative force. To do what Dave said, I'd have to have a lot of time.

I've played music and I've written pieces and between writing music and prose (or worse, screenplays as I also write those), music is much easier. You pick up your instrument and start playing and it comes to life. It doesn't work that way for writing. Not for me anyway. Writing is far more time consuming. Of course writing a song, starting and finishing it is much in the same but still again, during the process you can just say to someone, "listen to this", strum a bit and they experience it. How many times have we heard someone say or do that to us when we didn't really want to hear it and yet they played, we ended up hearing it and then we commented on it, good or bad?

But if I had the time... that is to say no day job, I could just write straight through, just bang the hell out of the keyboard till I'm finished. Like Dave does, or Keith Moon did. What could I turn out then? What would I discover along that way?

It got me to thinking. I thought about Hunter S. Thompson. I thought about Burroughs. Was I thinking about stream of consciousness Henry James? What? I don't know. But that was the thing, wasn't it? I didn't know? And I wanted to know. But I'd need time to decompress from this corporate life. 

I've discovered over the years of taking vacations that I need about a week, maybe two before I started to feel "Human" again. However, usually my vacations are only days, or a week or two. Sometimes I would just start to feel normal again (I think because normal is hard to recognize after a while not feeling it), it happens about the time the vacation is over.

Maybe that's why Europeans take a month off? 

I need then to what? Retire? Awesome! But my point is I would need time, a lot of it to decompress, then to start the process. Which is basically writing when it hits me and then beating the hell out of a story. What would that be like? Heaven, I'm sure.

Don't get me wrong. Writing is doing it, doing a lot of it. But when you have another entire full time job, that is when all this is relevant.

As it is now if I get an idea after bedtime, I get up out of bed to write it down. I write bits and pieces so I can later finish them, or use them somewhere I might not have foreseen at the time I dreamed it up. Which is the best sometimes. Last night I got up four times. I was exhausted, my brain was racing, and these were seriously good ideas. So I did it. But I slept in today. On a normal work night, I would have woken too tired to function properly at work all the next day. 

I guess you could argue, using Dave's reference, I could just sit and type furiously like a drum solo and see what comes up. But I do that now. I'm just looking for something else. Something beyond. Something I haven't and can't now do.

What is the point of all this? 

That I have a new concept to shoot for. That you could have a new concept to shoot for. For that thing out there on the horizon.

Maybe it would even lead to a different way of  viewing my writings. It's all good. Every little epiphany sparks something, moves something, evokes change, keeps things fresh. Offering hope of the beyond until finally you bring yourself to the beyond and that becomes the foundation for something new. A new you. A newness to what you produce. A new experience for those who experience what you produce on that new plane of existence.

Should be interesting....