Rhythm Of Writing

I remember 1981.  It was an important year for me for two reasons – I started kindergarten, and my parents ordered cable TV.  Instead of being at home all day, I now joined my sister in that mysterious tan brick building that smelled of ditto ink and chalk.  Instead of three local stations and PBS, I now had over twenty channels to watch, including a brand new channel called MTV, which immediately became my new fascination.  

I attended kindergarten in the morning, singing songs, reciting poems, and counting to one hundred.  By noon, I’d be home, planted on the floor in front of the TV set in our living room. My father would be on the couch behind me, catching catnaps, still groggy from night shift at the factory. I had the coolest afternoon babysitters that school year: Blondie, Pat Benatar, REO Speedwagon, Phil Collins, The Cars. I already loved listening to music, greedy for songs anywhere I could find them – the Elvis 8-track tapes my mother played on repeat in the Lincoln, the John Denver albums my older sister set spinning on the stereo console.  But now I could watch music too.

This scene in my childhood living room remains crystallized in my mind, my hair in a dark braid down my back, my father snoring on and off, our dog, Buffy lounging next to me, while I watched songs turn into stories before me.  I call upon this tableau, this still life with MTV, to remember how my obsession with rhythm began.

In first grade, I asked for dance lessons, which my sister had already been taking for a few years.  I liked ballet and jazz, the soft pink shoes we wore, the thick white tights. I liked the way we lined up and practiced our glissades and step-ball-changes, the wind our bodies created as we moved across the room.  Soon my dance teacher recruited me for tap. It was the smallest class and hard to fill. There were only six of us there on Monday nights, practicing shuffles and flaps and time steps, and it quickly became my favorite class.  I was infatuated with it – how it unlocked a different kind of rhythm, let me make a new kind of music with my own two feet. 

Perhaps it was tap dancing that led me to poetry. When I decided to take college classes in creative writing, I was most drawn to writing poems.  I saw it as a challenge. Put the right words in the right order, find the right cadence and tone, make the reader feel something they didn’t even know they wanted to feel.  

I was a dancer and poet long before I started playing instruments.  I learned guitar in 2000, at the age of 24. My husband, RJ, taught me the correct finger placements, the guitar resting against my pregnant belly.  I was jealous of his permanently calloused fingertips from playing since he was 13. He showed me the chords, taught me Pearl Jam and Third Eye Blind, songs from what we called our “younger days,” which sounds impossible to me now.  

We started an acoustic folk duo called Essential Machine in 2009.  The name is a kind of shorthand, another way to describe the heart, that vital contraption that keeps us all going.  RJ played guitar, I played glockenspiel, and we sang together. Within five years, we knew we wanted to expand the project into a full rock band, so we recruited our teenage son on keyboards and I recruited myself on the drums.  At the age of 38 I began my practice on the hodge-podge kit we’d assembled through cast-off pieces from friends and a very basic throne we bought online. My tap-dancing background helped shorten the learning curve, but so did my experience as a poet and writer. 

Writing and drumming are alike in so many ways.  You must have the right cadence and tempo. You must pay attention to rhythm and syncopation.  You must remember that each snare hit is a word, each measure a stanza. When you begin, you may feel as though you’re stabbing around in the dark, hoping to find something to hold onto.  You have to have a ridiculous amount of faith in yourself. And you have to give yourself over to the process.  

Even trickier is this – don’t overthink it. It’s good advice for life and writing and playing an instrument. When you become too aware of the process, that’s when you must let go and turn it over to “flow” that trance-like state that makes you lose all sense of where you are and who you are.  Time falls away, and nothing matters more than the body – the rhythms your fingers tap into a computer keyboard, the scratch of your pen across paper, your arms and legs in sync, your foot on the kick drum pedal, hickory sticks against the cool metal of the cymbals with each crash.  

In both cases, I think you have to let go.  It’s not the only way, but it is one way. You have to step outside yourself, allow yourself to be guided by forces you don’t fully understand.  You have to let the rhythm take control. 

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips