[Video: a zebra teaches a little girl to scat-sing. Found it at Zooglobble, home of "kids' music worth sharing."
Warning: do not visit that site if you are even mildly distractable.]
My Dad taught me many things about music, especially jazz, even (I’m certain) in ways which I have yet to understand or even recognize. But on one point he was (I believe) mistaken:
We were watching Ella Fitzgerald on some variety-TV show; after pausing for a musical break by the band, all of a sudden she burst into this chain of nonsense syllables: Obba-dobba-DOO-dah, ba-dadda-da-doo-da-DOO… (or whatever). Her eyebrows waggled like Mexican jumping beans, and she smiled slyly. Dad burst out laughing. “She always does that,” he said, “when she forgets the words.”
Like I said, I think Dad was wrong about that (especially given how enthusiastically he welcomed instrumental improvisation). But singers who depart radically from the composed lyrics must brace themselves for the inevitable skepticism. Judges on televised singing competitions lose patience with contestants who forget the words to the songs they’re singing. I’ve seen such contestants (and woebegone karaoke’ers) freeze, lock up hopelessly, stuck in a loop of flickering blankness. They stammer, neurons misfiring; they’re like desperate smokers rummaging through a drawerful of out-of-gas cigarette lighters. Sometimes, you can see on their faces, they know it’s coming even before they get there: they take off at a wild dead run at a gap they know they won’t be able to cross — they gallop right up to the edge and leap, bursting out in something like charismatic glossolalia: Obba-dobba-DOO-dah…
Then their eyes dart from side to side as they smile, weakly, as though to convince the onlookers: I’m doing this on purpose, y’know. “Norwegian Wood” can always be improved by some good scat.
It feels like a long time since I had nothing in particular to write. (In the grand scheme of things, not so long, really — about 4½ years.) As I set about doing whatever-comes-next with Seems to Fit, I’m nervous about Not Writing. Yes, I continue to get up a couple hours early every day but Sunday. And yes, I’ve got plenty of writing-related stuff to do: research into agents, query-writing-and-editing, picking here and there at the lint which I keep finding on the book’s opening chapters. (It’s gotta be drifting down from the overhead vents or something. I swear those pages were immaculate the last time I looked at them.) I’ve got more time for reading, not to be sneered at. And yes, of course there’s blogging to be done.
Even with blogging, though, it’s been a while since I last wrote “outside the box.” If you go back to the first year of RAMH archives, you’ll see that I was doing pretty close to a post a day; for a long and more recent time, I’ve been posting almost exclusively just on Wednesdays and Fridays. And the Midweek Music Break and whiskey river Fridays series, whatever their charms for readers might or might not be, however much work they do or don’t take to prepare, just don’t qualify as, well, writing.
Oh, I’ve got little bits of new fiction lying around. (Every time I open that junk drawer, one or the other of them pops and fizzles weakly at me.) Nothing really igniting yet, however.
On the other hand, I know myself: if I let myself get distracted by something new and shiny and substantial, like a new story or book, I won’t put in the time and (relatively boring) effort necessary to steer Seems to Fit into readers’ hands. But if I fritter away the hours on trivia, on writing exercises and blogging and the like, suppose I… suppose I forget the words? Have I already forgotten them — do I already not remember what it’s like to have no particular fire burning under me?
There’s really only one solution, I think. Just gotta keep going: putting one word after another, and another, after another… Unlike Ella (and other great improvisers), I doubt that the result will resemble “art.” But it’s the only way to keep the hardware from corroding, from falling apart in disuse.
So then: Obba-dobba-DOO-da…
“….hardware….corroding, …. falling apart in disuse.” YIKES! is that a blog posting of it’s own for me. While salvaging the practice from economic demise – I fear that all my tools have now rusted back to elemental form and will require starting over. Oi!
So, what do YOU do to remain limber???
I really envy, say, musicians at times like this. They can just run the scales. (Or maybe “just,” in quotes, run the scales; I have no idea what’s actually involved.) Crack their knuckles. Etc.
Blogging as a trivial pursuit? Hardly, JES. Your words have meaning and import, even without a Seems to Fit fire beneath you (ouch!). Not writing? Impossible. Scat for us, please…. I love to see where your brain goes.
a/b
Ah, A/B — for a shot of reassurance, there’s nothing like the support of long-time readers. Even well-ventilated ones. :)
Scatting underway. This was just the opening burst of random syllables!
oh gosh, I know exactly what you’re talking about.
but first–you won’t “forget the words.” i think side exercises etc really serve to make you sharper and readier for combat–particularly if they are rather different from the voice you’ve been writing in over the long haul.
also, reading breaks serve a similar purpose. if you can’t bear to do writing exercises do reading ones.
unsolicited advice–try to fill at least three months or so with other things before going back and messing with StF editorially. i know it’s old advice but i’ve found it is true for most of my authors–if it’s too recent, you’ll a) find problems where there aren’t any, and b) miss problems where there are.
also, DO make sure you take the next steps with the manuscript you’ve worked so hard on. when you’re ready to.
Thanks for the encouragement and the advice! Sincerely. (And I don’t at all mind the unsolicited sort — if everyone waited for me to ASK, I’d never get any advice at all.)
A little story:
Going back to August 2007, before I’d started this blog, before I’d resumed work on S2F*, when I suddenly decided I needed-needed-needed to write fiction again, I stood in the kitchen that first morning waiting for the teakettle to heat up… trying to imagine what the hell I was going to do at the keyboard when I got upstairs. I had in mind no plot, no characters, no theme or gimmick or title. I looked nervously around at the countertops. I suddenly realized I was focusing on this little device for splitting or crushing pills, to make them easier to swallow. It was still in the bubble packaging. The gizmo, the label assured me, went by the name “Cut-n-Crush.” What an odd product name, I thought. I pictured someone in an ad agency or the manufacturer’s home office or wherever, someone who’d gotten a raise or promotion for thinking of the name “Cut-n-Crush”…
The water started to boil. I made a cup of tea, grabbed a little fruit-and-grain breakfast bar, and went upstairs.
…and started to write a story about a man staring down at his kitchen counter, picking up this little plastic doo-dad labeled “Cut-n-Crush,” and wondering who’d come up with that name. I couldn’t have been more surprised to learn, within a few sentences, that the man so wondering was the president of a fictional country, trying to distract himself from the (mostly exaggerated) burdens of office…
The folder on my hard drive where the Merry-Go-Round manuscript resides is still named
cutncrush, even though the actual Cut-n-Crush scene is now gone. By the time I finished that MS (well, got to the end of it — “finished” is arguable!), a few months later, I was limbered up enough to go back to the book I just “finished” a couple weeks ago.I expect something similar will kick in this time around, too. Heard a minor news story on NPR a few weeks ago which I have not been able to forget. No storyline (or characters etc.) associated with it, but I have a feeling a muse is telling me that I should not forget it — that it needs to sit in my head for a little while, to see what sort of flies it attracts.
_____________________________
* As I try to remind myself to abbreviate it, lest some Internet snarkist tack an unsolicited “U” on the end. :)
Sheesh. Apparently I’m scatting even in my comment replies.
Phew, so glad to hear that “This was just the opening burst of random syllables!” I wasn’t sure where you were headed with this and feared a… Oh, I can’t even think it, never mind say it.
Reading this, I’m really in awe of how prolific a blogger you’ve been/are while also working and writing novels. This is no small stuff, this blog of yours. I don’t even know if I’d call it a blog. It seems so much more, I don’t know, enlightening and teacherly, but not in a pedantic kind of way, but in a really valuable and inspiring kind of way. You’re a writer to be read whether it’s blogging or fiction, and if I had my own Pantheon you’d be squarely in it.
So yeah, phew (wiping forehead), we’ll see more scats from you, right? The other words, well, they’ll be there for you when you’re ready. ;)
But don’t mess with Norwegian Wood!
Note to self: come back to explore Zooglobble in the daytime, when I can afford to be mildly (or highly) distracted.
John, you’ve been writing since the day you could string words together. Even in your talking, you are painting your words for others to listen to and try to picture on a page. Sometimes stopping for a moment and just breathing the atmosphere is enough. So let it be enough. Write on…you can’t help yourself! We’ll always keep reading…or at least I will.
Adore the Sciences Lullabye. Very assuring presentation of things normally terrifying to contemplate. I am very lost in my own writing and blogging life these days. Messing around with uncreative psychology to feed my work life and venting various obsessions I don’t like about myself. My fiction has disappeared into thin air, perhaps slipped into the ocean. Time is passing. The biological clock is ticking. My father is dying… I suppose I should write about it.
1. Love the video.
2. The video has given me an idea…
3. My published novelist friend Ami McKay once recorded a CBC Out Front episode about scat. It was called “From Smart Girl to Scat Girl.” Ami was my roommate but I’m not one of the roommates she mentions in the piece–probably because I wasn’t a music major and would have nothing to say about music, scat or otherwise. She took me to a few music major parties…I didn’t really fit in. Anyway, I’ll try to include the link. http://wwww.amimckay.com/smart2scat.mp3
4. It is interesting to me how we can think our parents know so much about a particular thing–that we may imagine they know everything about that thing–and then you begin to suspect maybe they don’t.