Wordsmiths

Hey Steph!

This week I've begun to wonder if I've mislabeled myself. I've always seen myself as a writer, but I started questioning whether I really had talent there or not. I spend the majority of my day writing. Writing magazine articles and social media updates for work. Writing academic jargon (that I try not to be jargon) for my thesis. Writing music lyrics for my soul and my acoustic guitar, Declan. Oh, and writing attempted profundity for this blog. Lots of words, but I'm not so sure their all worth reading.
               At work I've been writing an article about a band in my area. As I've immersed myself in their music, I've become more and more aware of the triteness of my own musical lyrics in comparison to their simple and emotion-filled lyrics. The more I learn about the group the more I want to do a good job on their article. I want to do their music and their goodness justice. I want to mirror their art with my art of journalism. And this desire pretty much paralyzed me at the keyboard. I wrote a sentence and deleted a sentence. Over and over, until I was left at the end of the work day with a blank screen.

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               Writing is hard business. I started to wonder if I just didn't have the talent for it, and if I should give up. (Quick time out: I freely admit now that this was a bit over the top. Please bear with me while I get to the point.) Who am I to call myself a wordsmith?

wordsmith: a master craftsmen of eloquent and profound writing

               There were people with broader vocabularies and more creative syntactic play. As I toyed around with the idea that I might not be cut out for it, a thought from a previous article I had written came to my head. The subject of the article was a painter. He told me that it bugs him when people come up to him and say, "Man, your work is beautiful! I wish I had that talent!" as if it were a compliment. He said that he's sure they are trying to be nice, but he always hears the idea that he didn't work hard to be a great painter. He said growing up he wasn't very good in art class, that his brother always did a better job than him. But he just kept painting and drawing and working. And he got really good at it.

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               As I recalled this conversation, I started wondering why I would ever think that writing should be easy. Olympians aren't amazing athletes because they were born that way. Concert violinists aren't masters because they picked up a violin a played it perfectly. They worked at it. We have this idea in Western culture of being blessed with the Muses in our creation of art, but I think we also need to be blessed with hard work as well. Just like a blacksmith must first master the art of making a symmetrical horseshoe before he can create a beautiful suit of arms, so must a wordsmith build one skill at a time before she can write her magnum opus.

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               November is the start of National Novel Writing Month. I know there are friends of mine out there that want to write a novel but have trouble pushing through the rough times. Let's consider this our first horseshoe: Get something out on the page. Once the words are living there in black and white, then we can craft them into a suit of arms. And if novel writing isn't your thing, pick something else. For me, I'm going to work through two songs that are presently musing around in my head unformed and unmetered with the goal of of leaving no lines of lyric behind that just kind of landed there because they rhymed and fit the musical cadence.
               There's a reason that libraries aren't just one shelf big. There's room there for the masters and the hard-working apprentices.

Cheers,

Amanda