Focus

On her radio show the other night (NPR's Piano Jazz), Marianne McPartland asked guest Bud Shank did he still play the flute, since he had been such a good player and had made a number of records on flute earlier in his career. He said something like, "Well, when that band broke up I had some time for reflection. And I realized that what I really wanted to be most of all was to be an alto sax player. So I figured the only way to get there was to throw away all of my flutes. And that's what I did."

There was a moment of stunned silence while that notion sunk in. Beautiful flutes. Thrown away. What a waste. What a stupid, wasteful thing to do. What a dissappointment to his fans. Would I throw away all of my pianos?

But then it started to dawn on me what an exceptionally disciplined and courageous thing that was for him to do. Really, it seems simple: what better way to narrow your focus than to eliminate distractions? It's like a painter who feels he needs to learn sculpture instead, and throws away all of his brushes and canvases and paints. Questions of value (How much could I sell them for?), responsibility (Shouldn't this stuff go into the hands of someone who can use it?), and attachment (Can I really part with such a lovely, comfortable brush? Such a well-worn pallette?) are themselves distractions that pull him back into involvement with the whole painting process, its aesthetics, its virtues, and pull his mind away from sculpture just when it's time to move on. Years later it could seem to others, just as it seems now to the artist, to be a significant turning point, a brilliant and dramatic shift in direction leading to new possibilities, new works, and new levels of achievement. For now, though, they might all think he's nuts.

And well he may be. The next night, a writing instructor speaking at a seminar I attended said in an offhand way that, paradoxically, the only safe path for a writer was to keep taking risks -- to keep changing, keep trying new and different things. In essence, "Once you've said something, it's time to say something else."

The only safe path is the risky one. If that isn't nuts, I don't know what is. But it's no crazier than thinking you can make a career out of telling stories and making things up -- even though that's got to be one of the oldest professions we've got. I mean, we wouldn't have any evidence of the other "oldest professions" if they hadn't been recounted in stories.

There's a saying among some writers that the best way to write a story is to just get out of its way and let the story tell itself. Stories know what shape they want to take. They know when they are believable and when they are not. They have rules that they generally follow and occasionally break.

Maybe that's the best way to go about life, after all. Just start off in a direction and then get out of the way. And hope yours ends up a comedy.