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Play It, Maestro

A writer should worship words the way a maestro worships Mahler and play them with the same kind of fervor those maestros show on the podium. Using a different metaphor, I discussed this in one of my recent videos (released on our social media channels every Thursday morning). I’d like to say (or show) a few more words on this.

Playwrights tend to be especially gifted with language. Here’s a passage from Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus, in which a composer, a jealous rival of Mozart, discusses the importance of his profession:

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Write From The Wound

A thing writing teachers (including me) love to say is “Write from the scar, not the wound.”

It’s good advice – for more on why, listen to Joselin Linder talk about it on Gotham’s Inside Writing) – but as we move into month 111 of living through three global crises, I’ve been thinking about the value of writing from the wound.

Consider the work of James Baldwin. In essays and fiction, Baldwin chronicled the pain of racial injustice, the turmoil of desegregation, and the voices, violence, and victories of the Civil Rights movement. Sometimes he wrote about crisis as it was still unfolding; sometimes, he wrote about it a decade or more later, with hindsight.

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