Have
you written anything today? Will you? What about yesterday—or
tomorrow?
This
past week a friend sent me a set of quotes from famous writers. My
eyes gravitated to a statement by science fiction writer Ray
Bradbury:
Quantity
produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.
I've
been reading Emperor
Norton's Hunch,* a
history of trumpet player Lu Watters, who sparked a revolution in
jazz in the 1940s and early '50s. Like many of his generation, his
career was deferred as he answered his country's call to arms. But
rather than abandon his dreams or put them on a shelf, he did what he
could during the war to prepare to launch a reconstituted band in
peacetime.
Serving
in the Navy aboard a slow transport, the S.S.
Antigua,
bound for Hawaii, he forced himself to engage in what became his most
productive period as a composer.
Every
day, just to get away from everything . . . I went to the bow of the
ship . . . and I wrote a tune a day. Some of them weren't very good,
and . . . of course I knew this. When you write a tune, once in a
while you get a wild inspiration and you outline a tune and if you
have any sense after that initial stage you'll play around with it a
little bit, but anyway I wrote one a day.
Those
“tunes,” the author notes, were not just simple compositions, but
ones of some complexity. And thanks to Watters's postwar band, The
Yerba Buena Jazz Band, and others
they influenced, many become traditional jazz standards.
A
photo caption in the book identifies the dates that Watters, at the
bow of the S.S. Antigua,
wrote these tunes:
“Annie Street Rock”—Sept.
10, 1944
“Sage
Hen Strut”—Sept. 11, 1944
“Antigua
Blues”—Sept. 12, 1944
“Big
Bear Stomp”—Sept. 13, 1944
“Hambone
Kelly”—Sept. 14. 1944
If you
want to write something good, you have to write something. To avoid
writing mistakes, false starts, and material you'll have to discard,
don't write anything.
The
acronym comes in several forms, but the one I know is FOKSIC. Fingers
on keyboard, seat in chair.
Your
turn.
* See
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTUjnl5C5l8
for a video of the Yerba Buena Stompers, a Lu Watters tribute band,
playing “Emperor Norton's Hunch,” composed aboard the S.S.
Antigua.
