Bingo in Swansea and Innate Ability
For five minutes I wrote music reviews but it became obvious very quickly this just wasn’t my bag.
I’d read this SFJ article before I attempted it.
There were two lines from the article that I kept thinking about while I was trying to do my reviews:
“Alongside the beat runs a distressed motif that may have been a melody before it was Xeroxed fifteen times.”
and
“It isn’t a pop chorus, or any sound that you’d hear on American radio, even if the station were playing, you know, world music. It’s a voice from a place where kids throw rocks at tanks, where people pull down walls with their bare hands.”
As I tried to write about music, I just knew my brain would not ever be able to make that kind of connection for the reader.
It wasn’t a sad realization, more like a relief, okay, here’s something I don’t have to attempt, I know it’s not for me.
In some ways, realizing there is a kind of writing that I’m not really constitutionally set up to do well actually solidified my belief in my writing and my drive to continue.
During the years that a pretty severe social anxiety had kept me from attempting anything for publication, writing for an audience had always been this vague abstraction, a monolithic and somewhat impenetrable activity.
When something is an abstraction, it’s hard to know how genuine it is. Am I really a writer or do I just like the idea of Being a Writer?
Somehow, this negative space - something I couldn’t do - just clarified for me that there is something I can do, this just wasn’t it. An edge of the monolith was identified.
I didn’t feel, in the words of Natalie Goldberg’s Roshi, “tossed away” by this lack of specific ability, I just felt confident I need to keep trying until I found the thing that would feel right.
