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Michael Lydon has contributed columns regularly here about the writer's art, but for this installment we asked him to tackle a form of writing with which he is particularly familiar: songwriting. Lydon has written about popular music since the '60s, and he also writes and performs his own music. Here he presents some songwriting advice from his "sometimes agonizing, sometimes blissful experience."
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There's a funny ad on TV right now about a guy named Dave. A red-headed man with a beard, he wanders into his office and greets a large number of other bearded red-headed guys also named Dave. Someone named Dave is fixing the photocopier while a mail delivery person, also named Dave, arrives with a package for, you guessed it, Dave.
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While the semicolon has long been a favorite topic of discussion at grammarian cocktail parties, the fact that this intermediate piece of punctuation has leapt from its place in linguistics to make a cameo appearance in not one, but two Broadway shows, is surely a sign that things are currently very right, and very write, on the Great White Way.
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When I started writing back in high school, I developed the nervous practice of producing a sentence and then going back to edit it, immediately. Perhaps you do the same thing? I advise you to take a hard look at your own writing and, break the instant-editing habit as quickly as possible.
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"Writers struggle to get the right words down in the right order, to put every comma, or nearly every comma, in its proper place; and readers follow the writers' final sequence of words and commas as printed on the page," Michael Lydon writes, "but what happens between writer and reader is far more amorphous, more emotional than the precision needed for the process would suggest."
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I passed Grade 11 Math only by promising to never, ever, take math again. At the time, I thought it was a trick question!
After seeing two of my kids struggle with learning disabilities, I now think I have dyscalculia. Regardless, I do an awful lot of basic arithmetic for my writing, and I think you might benefit from doing some too.
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