On Creative Writing
My first real adventure with creative writing began with a course I took back in high school with a tough, but inspirational teacher named Irma Erickson. This was one of the courses at my school that you didn’t miss if you were a creative kid.

We wrote a novel during the year – each chapter written in a different style of expression – first person prose, poetry, third person biography, lyrics, etc. It was a class that captured all our imaginations and we each would read our efforts each couple of weeks to the rest of the class amid gales of laughter or choruses of groans.

My efforts were fledgling to say the least, but the experience certainly got me hooked.

There was also a technical part of the class. We learned to diagram sentences. Everyone used to talk about how that was like higher mathematics, but I took to it like a fish to water and learned from it and became a backstage critic of other writer’s sentence structure over the years.

In his book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell explains that one does not really master a craft or a career until he or she has spent 10,000 hours practicing the process. I’ve been fascinated with this concept since I read it and find myself agreeing with him completely.

Looking at my own life, I’ve certainly done my 10,000 hours in the recording studio and also sitting in a chair writing both the lyrics and music of songs. Have I mastered either? That’s arguable. On any given day I can feel triumphant or simply like a beginner depending on the problems at hand, yet those 10,000 hours have put me on a pretty knowledgeable perch and enabled me to at least have a crafted approach to my passions.

Though I’ve spent my 10,000 hours writing lyrics and I think like a wordsmith, my recent efforts at prose (close to 200 blog postings) puts me more at around 600 hours. So as a writer of prose, I’m just a baby. Luckily I’ve spent a lifetime working in the theater and have learned a few good things about story telling to get me going.

And of course, my great adventure with Irma Erickson prepped me royally for this latest adventure in creativity.

Lyric writing also has provided a kind of formal basis. I have learned from the masters of the theater this wonderful and diminishing craft and I’m bound and determined to keep the integrity of the craft high in a climate that seems to want to pull it down from its high position of expression to a sad form of street doggerel.

I listened to a beautiful song just this morning sung by a professional and highly successful singer/songwriter that was just ruined (for me) when he actually tried to rhyme the words “receive”, “see’ and “dream”. This is a song that would have Alan Lerner rolling over in his grave and Ira Gershwin simply chortling up his sleeve.

Perhaps some of you think me an elitist, but those three words simply do not rhyme and are just a small part of the sad decline of lyric writing in American music. They say that the decline of a civilization can be often first seen in the decline of its language. So perhaps I’m just workin’ to save the country.

Jimmy Webb, another great lyricist this time from the pop culture said that anybody who would call himself a lyricist and not have read the dictionary from cover to cover is not taking advantage of his tools. I like this way of thinking and keep a dictionary along with my rhymer and thesaurus in each room of the house just in case.

But for the moment I’m a blogger and I like it. I often wonder how Irma would react to the term “blogger”. I think she’d smile and shout “Write on!” Pun intended.

I said to my sweet wife the other day, “I think I’d be fulfilled if I only had but one reader of this blog business.” I am glad for all of you, but the experience of writing each night is creative, cathartic, inspirational and each night, though met with the problems of composition, totally fulfilling to my need for expression.

It’s also been a great walk back through the inspirational moments of my life. This, I have enjoyed to no end. By the time I’ve run out of things to talk about, I should have an autobiography much like I wrote long ago in Irma’s class – a merging of styles and stories and thoughts and experiences that should set forth a story of a life.

For more inspirational music, thoughts and ideas from Peter Link,
please visit Watchfire Music.