Writing a Blog

 I didn't learn to write by writing this blog. I think I have always had some sort of capacity to write. I remember trying to experiment with quotation marks in, oh, I think Grade Five. And in my late teens I even managed to get some poetry published. The one time I tried to write a novel, though, I crashed and burned. I think that I really focused on writing during a low point in my performance career when I both set out to write a book on guitar technique and started writing letters to the editor of the Globe and Mail ("Canada's National Newspaper" --from Toronto, of course). The challenge there was to write something interesting and topical in less than eight hundred words. I got good enough at it that I could get maybe one in four actually published in the paper.

The secret of writing, based on these experiences, came down to: be concise. Ok, my propensities lie in that direction anyway. But I've been reading Marcel Proust for the last couple of weeks and, well, concise is not the only way to go. Instead, you can unfold sentences as if they were unending spools of wire or immense rolls of paper, opening out and falling in different directions only to turn back on themselves and reveal more and more facets and perspectives while all the while delving deeper and deeper, not only into one particular topic, but into it and all related topics--into passing perceptions, slight allusions, parenthetical observations, all the while circling around the central idea as if it were a magnetic pole ever drawing the attention near, but that attention, given the fluidity of its focus, glances by and turns on itself and the thought, the perception, the observation widens and narrows, always finding new turns of phrase.

And that, as Proust's style goes, was quite a short and pithy sentence. Think of him as the Anti-Hemingway of prose. Never likely to use one word when fifty were available. I have seen sentences by Proust that occupied a couple of pages and in which one might search for several minutes before stumbling across the elusive verb.

Is the most interesting thing about the relationship between the structure of writing and the structure of music how similar they are or how different they are?