I’ve worked here and there over the past week on a few sideline projects, so I have put them on my To Do list. One is that I want to work on a new short story, you know, a new piece to help inject some extra energy to the novel. I’m also making progress on that, but to set it aside and plunge into something else is kind of like taking a vacation. A change is as good as a rest, they say. Another thing I’m working on is some song lyrics.
My jazz partner Gord, the other half of the Itty Bitty Big Band, has been spending his Covid time doing some composing. He wants me to have a try writing some lyrics for this one tune he created. Now, I really want to do this, but here’s the thing. I have never written lyrics before. In fact, I have never written poetry. I don’t know what happened to the poetry-writing segment in highschool… Maybe I was sick that day. All I know is that this is an excellent struggle, call it “challenge” for me, to get my brain out of thinking literally. I understand simile and metaphor when it comes to other people’s lyrics, but getting my brain to look at an idea and express it … from the side, rather than head-on, is really tough for me.
On the other hand, another neat moment that came up in Dash & Lily was when Lily’s great aunt said, “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they’re yours.”
In the middle of the show that struck me like a bus. So I paused the show to make a note of it, and afterward looked it up, and it’s a quote from Richard Bach, who wrote Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I love this quote: “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they’re yours.” So long as I keep saying, I can’t do something, it will be true that I can’t do that thing. So I am going to stop arguing my limitations, and turn “I can’t write poetry,” or “I can’t write song lyrics”, into “I can write song lyrics.”
I have a feeling working on poetry is going to be very good for my writing in general. And hey, if I stop arguing my limitations in other areas of life, that’s also going to be good.
Who’s with me!?