Abandon Hope

One of my favorite (and, I contend, one of the best) songwriters around today is Andy Gullahorn. His music is a thought-provoking mix of candor, honesty, humor and hope. And his performances — storytelling, guitar work, vocals — are masterfully delivered. (If you don’t know Andy’s music, start here: go to YouTube and find Any Gullahorn, “Small Things” from Nashville’s Historic Ryman Theater, January 29, 2021.)

            Several years ago, Andy and I were sitting on my porch after one of his concerts, sharing stories and comparing notes. Given the utter comfort that he seems to have on stage, I asked him (since I’ve never been comfortable in front to people myself) if he ever gets nervous before his gigs.
Andy: “No.”
Me: “Really?!” Never.”
Andy: “Pretty much never.”
“Come on,” I say, “surely you don’t sleep good on the night before some big gig.”
Him: “I sleep just fine.”
And then Andy offered some therapy. “Allen, you know what your problem is?”

            Which leads to Rule Number 5 about writing.

  “So what is my problem, Dr. Gullahorn?”
Andy’s answer was something like this. “Allen, you’ve played a lot of concerts and you’ve probably had some nights that felt like grand slams. Everything lined up just right — the room, the audience, the sound and lights, the song selection. The gig was all you hoped it could be. Grand slam. . . . And maybe, somewhere along the line, you made that the expectation for every night, as if every gig could be a grand slam. You set the bar unrealistically high. That’s a lot of stress to carry. And that’s where ‘nervous’ comes from.  . . . Grand slams are nice, but if I hit a single or a double, I’m OK with that.”

            Any perfectionists out there feeling an ‘ouch’ about now?

            As I wrote Theo of Golden, there were pleasant moments when I felt like I’d said exactly what I wanted to say, wrote a good sentence, or created the feel that I wanted a particular passage to have. If not grand slams, some of those lines and paragraphs landed on the page quite nicely.

            But there were other times when what I wrote seemed adequate but improvable. And I would redraft, start over, try again and again. There were days I’d spend hours on a single sentence or short paragraph. Frustrating to put it mildly. (I had experienced the same thing as a songwriter, but it’s much easier to move on from a twenty line song than it is with a text of 350 pages.) In both cases, words could be awfully evasive and uncooperative. I’ve had to accept that I’m not capable of writing 115,000 words at grand-slam level. Few are. I don’t suppose there are many sentences ever written that couldn’t have been written better with time and effort.

            So. Rule Number Five. Abandon hope of reaching perfection (or, to put it a bit more positively, be realistic.)

            Accept from the start that we bring our shortcomings and limitations to the writing desk. Perfectionists (I’m fairly certain I belong to some substrata of that terrible category) who venture into fiction might find themselves on inhospitable terrain if every word they write has to be the absolutely, positively, inarguably (or is it indisputably?) best word.

            Accept then, (I tell myself), that there will be balls and strikes, outs, singles, doubles, and, once in awhile, a home run paragraph or a grand slam phrase. And remember, the goal is to tell the story. One can tell a perfectly good story with very poor grammar and very imperfect sentences. We do it all the time. Lighten up. Storytelling ought to be enjoyable.

            TO BE CLEAR: rule number five is no license to be sloppy, lazy, hurried, or too forgiving of oneself. Anyone who wants to honor the craft of writing and offer something worthy of others’ attention should aim high.