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The Best Times and Worst of Time

In the time Justin and I have written this blog, there have been some really good pieces, some really bad pieces and a bunch of stuff somewhere in between. This is the nature of the beast. We set up this weekly writing challenge in such a way that on any give week one of us picks the topics while the other picks the style. This has given results that are a little unpredictable. There have been piece that I thought would be funny, that ended up kind of blah and there have been topics with difficult poetry types that have turned out surprisingly good. We have had weeks were the results are wildly different and other where we are so close we use the same color and the same unusual word in a poem. This is all part of the fun.

I would like to tell you I always enjoy the process, but the truth is sometimes it is really hard. I would like to tell you it is always rewarding, but there are times I have gotten to the end and I thought, not really happy with that. There is lesson to be learned from even these.

I have to say I hesitate to tell you about the worst week’s writing, for fear of stirring some political rants, but in my mind, of all the work I have done, one piece falls to the bottom. It was meant to be funny, but the jokes didn’t really fly then and they certainly are less funny now. It was supposed to have a historical bent and while the quotes are historical quotes, they didn’t really fit together as well as I had hoped. Of all the pieces we have posted, if I was allowed to remove one, this would be the one I would remove. This travesty was the 5 minute play on Trump.

To start with I was pretty excited about this piece. I thought doing a piece where I placed Trump, who was a candidate it appeared destined to lose, in the midst of past presidents would be funny. I could lampoon him a little bit with his own words and I could include great presidential quotes. I thought I would place him in the midst of Jefferson, Lincoln and Eisenhower, that I would be able to look up a few quotes by each of these guys and the piece would weave itself together. In short, that did not happen. The characters didn’t easily talk to each other, the quotes were often so tied to their time, they had to be bent to work together. There was no banter. They didn’t talk to each other and they never really talked to me. Worse, I couldn’t strike that balance of genuinely funny with Trump. I knew not everyone would agree with my handling of him, but if you do it right you should walk away with people saying, at least is was funny. He came off as mean or stupid, pompous and war mongering, but never funny. So I made him a character Trump supporters would hate that I had written him so and Trump haters would point at and say see, but not laughing, not seeing it as funny. This was not just a miss, it was a miss I took extra long to write and I would have no idea how to fix even today.

If I am telling you about the difficulty, the disaster, I think it is important to write about the magic that sometimes happens. There is a moment that you can not create, that there is no ritual to summon, that happens so very rarely, but you wish it would happen all the time. It is a moment when you are writing a piece and you lose yourself to it, that you stop wrestling the word to the paper and instead they reveal themselves. When you are done you feel almost as if the writing come from somewhere else. There are nuances and details steeped with meaning that even as you read them, read the very words you wrote, you are taken by them. You wonder how you could have written them. For all of the assignments, for all the works, both easy and difficult, this has happened only completely to me once.

It started as a simple piece, a letter meant to be written to an inanimate object. I don’t know how to tell you about it, so I will tell you what was going on as I wrote. It had been just a few months since my wife had passed away and I desperately wanted to know why. I was hurting. So, as I wrote a piece to a spruce tree, written from the master violin maker who was cutting it down, I was, in a way giving reason to my own experience. I started with research, but by the second or third paragraph I was no longer writing, the words were writing themselves and I was crying a grieving in a way I need so much at the time. Additionally, I found when I shared this with people it helped them grieve, too. I don’t know if it was because they saw my pain, felt there own, or somehow got an answer they themselves were looking for. Even now, it is the kind of writing I wish I could do all the time, but I fear it was a special piece written at a difficult time, just when I needed it most.

You can find that piece here: http://brothersweeklywriting.blogspot.com/2016/02/letter-jason.html