Music Before the Money

“In my writing I am acting as a maker,

an explorer of psychic areas
. . . a cosmonaut of inner space,

and I see no point in exploring areas
that have already been thoroughly surveyed.”

- William S. Burroughs

Where are we?

I wrote a post on wroters’ block and how I never get it. It’s not that the ideas don’t get awfully thin at times but I have ways of getting over these patches. One of the ways is by opening up an atlas. Then I wander through the pages until some pace name grabs me. Once I zero in on this spot I’ll get online and get a closeup of the rivers, streams and mountains. Now I have a location.

So you have a spot; now what?

Now you read about the area: animals, towns, customs, history. See if your characters will fit in to this locale. Will it change them? How will it change the people around them? Will the story line adjust to this change in area?

Linking

If you watch the Indiana Jones series you see Indie and his characters go to different parts of the world. There is even a map on the background with a dotted red line showing the audience where they are going. George Lucas and his writers does this wonderfully as they do in the Star Wars series. The characters are led to a different place in a chase for a person, alien or a piece of information that will carry them to the next scene and, finally, the climax. My character, Harley Melanson, in The Millennium Man is in four wars.

Getting Out

If the characters need to move along (if it’s that type of a story) go back to the atlas and pick another location. Repeat the last section you’ve just read and formulate another subplot. Now you have an idea of how to get them out of “Scene Peru” to “Scene Alaska.” Because it doesn’t matter where you take them the location will help you write the scene.

Staying Put

I have been discussing an action-adventure novel but other genres work well with moving around the globe. Now, if you don’t want to move, you just have to research (or visit) your fixed locale so that you know it well. If you are going to write about World War II Paris it’s difficult to find a time machine but it’s not difficult to read countless books on the subject: buildings, gun emplacements, check stops. You don’t necessarily need to visit Paris but it would ad so much if you did.

I’ve been to London, Berlin and Paris. But I’ve never been to Madrid, St. John’s, Newfoundland or Moscow. But they’ve all been locations in my novels.

“Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey.
But this, so far from discouraging,
only adds to the joy
and glory of the climb.”

-Winston Churchill

“When I win the ‘Irish’”

My great aunt Doris used to tell us kids of all the things we were going to do “when I win the Irish.” She meant the Irish Hospital Sweepstakes which came into vogue in the 1930’s. At the time of its inception, lotteries were generally illegal in the United Kingdom and United States so “the Irish” became very popular in the absence of other readily available lotteries.

The Big One

How many people do you know buy lottery tickets actually thinking that one day will be their turn to win? I bet there are more than you can count on the fingers of one hand. Even though the odds are staggering just enough people win to keep up the interest. Because if the pot constantly reaches $7 million someone’s got to be buying them.

When We Get the Money

I have put off many activities as well because I wanted to be in the right position, fiancially, to do it. However, when I began to reprioritize business and family - put the letter first - the decisions became clearer. I mentioned before about Chapin’s song Cats in the Cradle and how I strived to make sure that the father in the song was not me. But I was, at times. I would think nothing of spending money for business purchases but would balk at a big trip for the kids.

It Doesn’t Have to Slip Away

Staying in present time does not have to change overnight. Do it bit by bit. Make a few hours a week available for these activities:

1. Kids
2. Wife or significant other
3. Yourself
4. Other family members
5. Others who may need you help

Do this in baby steps at first and I will assure you it will soon become a habit. One day you will wake up and wonder how you lived the way you did. Because it really is the journey that is important.

 

Well, we’re all in the mood for a melody
And you’ve got us feelin’ alright

- Billy Joel, The Piano Man

Piano bars have to be the most stereotyped venues in the music business. I often joke about playing piano bars as the “Fuzzy Bow-Tie Circuit.”

For years I alternated between bands and solo. And as a single entertainer I went back-and-forth between pubs and piano bars. Billy Joel has almost got it down perfectly in The Piano Man, where the piano player becomes a confident to the stories of misspent youth and unfulfilled dreams.

One of the most interesting aspects of a piano bar is that your audience is literally “in your face.”

In many cases they are too close for comfort. However, this bodes for an intimacy that led to may great friendships with people with whom I still have contact. Two men in particular, regional sales managers, even book their sales conferences around the dates when I was playing in a particular town.

Why?

Well, watch some reruns of Cheers. All the patrons have more or less disfucntional lives but their real lives revolve around the pub and the people the know there. Even if they don’t particularly like these people they become family - albeit a dysfunctional one. For example, no one in Cheers really liked Frasier Crane but each of the patrons was sincerely sad when he moved away.

For many musicians a piano bar is too close to the audience.

They thrive on their art and are happy to be at arms length. There were many nights I wished for this disentanglement, especially with obnoxious drunks and the like. However, there were many nights when the whole place was singing along with every song I played.

It’s part and parcel of being an entertainer. You want to be appreciated for what you do. On many nights when the lights finally went out, and I was wandering off to get a pizza, I used to feel content that, for one brief moment, many of them could forget whatever was wrong in their respective lives.