Write Like a Puritan Jane Breakell (bio) When I played the piano as a child, the quality that distinguished my playing from the others’ was this: extreme hesitancy—sometimes mistaken for, or charitably misnomered as, delicacy of expression. I hover-handed the keys between measures, trying to read ahead, trying, usually unsuccessfully, to avoid a mistake. Two boys, a year or so older than I, took lessons from the same teacher and played in the same recitals that I did, which were held at the Baptist church in town. While I moped through minor-key études, they played the kind of music that exceeded my limits: complicated fugues and polonaises, fast and loud. One of these boys’ fathers was a trained pianist. His family lived next door to us, and on warm open-window days we could hear either one of them powering through something thorny, sounding just like a CD. Maybe they made mistakes, but I never heard them. To me their success had nothing to do with practice. They were graced with a gift. My father was musical too, in a different way. He played the guitar and sang us to sleep with folk songs (one of two: “Freight Train” or “Old Blue,” every night), which strumming, while very pleasant, did not impress me as the fugues next door did. I was in awe, however, of my father’s drawing. A silversmith known for whimsical figurative brooches, he kept a big black sketchbook full of drawings that were, to my eye, perfect. For example, a rabbit, slightly feral looking, long of ear and neck; a stalk of broccoli, the florets perfectly beady; a snowflake that seemed on the edge of melting. For a while I took art lessons, hoping to tap into some latent inherited talent. My father’s lines were bold and clear, but my sketchbook was a visualization of my piano-playing, full of wispy lines and erasure stains. That my dad had taught himself to draw and carve and cast, that he had to have made many mistakes before success—that is, before I was born—never occurred to me. Some people, like my dad, have a way of just trying things out without minding the result. They accept the idea of “failing better” through a combination of boldness and discipline. This is not how I like to do things. I like to know how it’s going to turn out. Correction: I like to know with certainty that it’s going to turn out the way I want it to and preferably as good or better than anyone around me can do. Hence, a proclivity for formal instruction and, even after that, the hover-hands at the keyboard, the whispered lines in the sketchbook, and the ultimate abandonment of both music and art by the time I left college. Because if you don’t have the gift, and someone else does, then why bother? I moved to Washington, DC, and got a job as a policy researcher. I loved making spreadsheets and talking points. Still do. [End Page 92] Then I moved to New York, grew up a little, realized I controlled nothing, and to my own surprise began to write short stories. I never knew how a story would end when I started it. I wrote on pure intuition. I edited, but since nobody was reading except me, I can’t say what standard I was editing to. It could be that I was finally embracing non-control. It could be that I am legitimately better at writing than music or art. But what may be more important is that I did not grow up around any successful writers, so I have no impossible childhood ideal of a “writer” with whom to compare myself. This is the best, I thought, feeling my resting heart-rate slow and my breath deepen as I rearranged imaginary details. I thought of the word “vocation”; I felt called. Still, I thought, I’d better take some lessons. Here is something that could be important: the Baptist church, the house of fugues, my family’s jewelry workshop—the places where I learned to base my self-assessments...
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Feb 14, 2018
Marte Blikstad-Balas + 2
Open Access
