The first time I remember watching someone play a musical instrument, I was probably three or four. It was my grandfather, which is to say my mother's father. He played the banjo, and he still does. My siblings and I can look back upon our memories at their cottage and hear him pluck those strings and play those scales.
When I was ten, he bought me my first guitar. I had been doing a little work as a paper delivery person - pretty standard for a pre-teen - and my grandfather told me that when I had saved one hundred and fifty dollars, he'd take me to the music shop and we would pick out a guitar. About two months later - and after a few youth-driving impulse purchases - I had saved the one-fifty, and like he said, my grandfather took me to the music shop.
It's almost twenty-years later, and I'm still playing the guitar. But the role of music - or perhaps more accurately, my playing music - has taken on something of a different purpose in my life. During university, I started reading and then writing with increasing frequency. Each summer I would read what I considered to be classics, and this in turn made me want to write.
Writers do all sorts of things when they write, and they have all sorts of rituals and things they do to keep moments of inspiration on the horizon, get them through a tough place in a novel, or whatever the case may be. One of my favourite writers, James Frey, has said that listening to music while he's thinking and writing dialogue, helps him to write dialogue in a more authentic way. Other's like Joyce Carole Oates, turn instead to physical exercise like running when they are working out plots lines or characters or whatever, in their head. In the case of Oates, she maintains that doing something methodical can be creatively restorative - and if you're lucky, something inspirational may trigger your writing hand along the way!
What I like to do is something of a mixture, in concept at least, as it doesn't involving running. Whenever I'm working out a problem or am aimless as to where I want my story to go, I grab my guitar and start playing chords. What's funny is that most times, I play the same pattern of chords over and over and over again, until I either relent to the increasing feeling that this work is lost for the night, it's gone out to sea...or until I figure it out and get going again. The words land safely on the page and nobody gets hurt.
There's just something about those beats, those sounds that clear my head and give me the proper head space to think about my story. But that's just my jive!
