The Sound On The Page

I finished Ben Yagoda’s The Sound On The Page today…

and I feel discouraged.

The book is about writing style. It is a good book, don’t get me wrong; I like his writing a lot but, there are some, oh let us call them, intimations, from the book that are, oh let us say, depressing.

In a book about style, there are obvious connections to musical style which is, yes, obvious. Obvious, in case you missed it.

Consider the old saw that there are eight notes in the musical scale, how you use them is…

style.

i.e., everything.

Now ask yourself how many people you’ve known over the course of your life that have picked up an instrument and compare it with the number of musicians whose style you could name, blindfolded so to speak?

(I could probably tell you the Stevie Ray Vaughan song from just a few bars of a solo).

That’s one thing. The other intimation from the book is that style is the person.

I’m in trouble. I’m not a great person in any sense of the word.

So I’m walking today thinking about the book and the upshots and it hits me:

I started playing the guitar at fifteen and never really made any money from it though I was able to at least get gigs in a small college town and some neighboring big cities in Ohio like Columbus and Cincinnati, some twenty years later. For those of you keeping score at home, that was twenty years. 20.

So if I gained no style musically, in twenty years, how can I hope to gain any style writing?

Sure, Yagoda gives advice like active reading and active writing and active editing but shitballs, I’m 46, I don’t think there is enough time.