I’m much more of a writer than I am a musician, but I still think of music first when I think of composing.
Is a word a note? An idea? One quality of writing is in the way it communicates, the kinds of communication it facilitates. Perhaps the meaning isn’t in the word (or the phrase or the sentence) but in the reading of it, or in the context in which it emerges, Perhaps it’s connotation. Perhaps the words merely represent rather than constitute menaing. Or maybe the language is required for the meaning.
Writing is putting words on a page; writing is making loops on the back of an envelop; writing is typing or voice to text. Writing is an essay, an article, a novel, a sonnet, a sprawling epic, and a tight minimalist short story.
The definitiveness that words make possible, the naming, the precision and determination of it all, is a form of meaning-making worth taking seriously, in and of itself.
Writing is putting together words, ideas, trajectory, line, paragraph, plot, analysis, tone, rhythm, a quality of feeling, and a path.
I’m writing in a cafe in the week before Halloween, and the chosen music of the morning is creepy. Eerie juxtapositions interrupt my grading, my messy four-circle Venn diagram of “resistent,” “rebelious,” “plucky,” and “interesting” heroines.
I explain: These metaphors are not my idiosyncratic invention. Think of paragraphs in this kind of essay like pearls on a chain. Think of ideas like bricks scattered across the grass. Figure out what you’d like to build with those bricks.
A single note can communicate an element of a feeling, but it’s the composition, the sequence of it, figuring out how to sequence it, that allows the idea to emerge, be realized and be fully evoked.
Writing is a romance and a mystery, a necklace and a construction site. To compose with meaning is to make your own pearls, build your own path, yourself.