I can… (trying something new)
I can… (trying something new)

I can… (trying something new)

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!?