Thomas Sullivan

Love that George Jones song.  If you have an ounce of passion in you for anything, a single unblemished ideal, or if you feel a poignant stab in the heart for any kind of perfection, then you understand what’s behind that song.  

Writers get it.  Real writers.  Lovers of the Muse.  When you want something so badly that it makes your teeth ache and you swallow sand and you know that whatever the obstacles, it’s just right for you – not for someone else maybe, but absolutely for you — and life just won’t move forward unless you are in pursuit of that holy grail, well…that’s when you come alive.  And only then.  Passion sweats blood. 

Only sometimes you bleed out.  Bleed white.  Your veins constrict, your heart turns into a dried husk, and your mind goes cold.  That’s when you THINK you stop loving the Muse.  Because passion that intense is draining, and rejection takes its toll.  Your commitment may be true, but even a faithful dog backs off when it’s kicked in the teeth enough times.  So your fingers slip off the keys; you quit caring.  Hope becomes a dull ache, and you walk around in a novocaine stupor.  You listen to loud music, you laugh at things that aren’t funny, you get hyper interested in feng shui or the kids next baseball game.  The people around you who have patiently endured your impossible dream seem almost relieved.  You are back.  You are acting the way they act.  Life is suddenly clear and simple and balanced. 

And predictable.                    

But then you get a glimpse of color flitting past the window one day or hear a whisper in the leaves alongside an autumn path, and it’s like remembering where you placed your car keys.  You vividly recall where you were going!  It hits you full passion with a touch of dismay.  Because you realize that you are wasting your life, wasting precious time.  Like the white rabbit, you are so late!  You can’t believe you let yourself become a zombie, that you lost faith with what you started out to be.  The stars and the galaxies are still there; you just quit reaching for them. 

But giving up on your dream is like letting the best part of you commit suicide.  Because that’s where the real you lives.  Your dream is where you are honest with yourself.  If it dies, what’s left except to live a lie?  And, yes, you can live a lie where appearances demand it, but you can’t do it 24/7.  You need somewhere, sometime to live your dream, to know that it could really happen, to feel that you are worthy of it.  Living a lie might meet the world’s expectations for you on the surface — it might even be noble, depending on your situation — but by definition it cannot be honest. 

So you re-visit your dream.  Secretly at first.  Maybe life interferes with that a little bit.  But you find a way, even if at the start it’s only in your mind, your heart.  You imagine, plan, fantasize.  And then you dare to reach out on a computer screen or a piece of paper.  And the words come back.  Because that’s who you are.  Words and thoughts.  That’s all anyone is, only with some people — writers – communication is infinitely more acute.  You need words both coming and going.  Like breaths.  Inhale, exhale.  Words are oxygen.  You are a willing slave to the Muse.  Forever in love. 

But you only recognize that when you think you’ve stopped loving your dream.  Because your passion is so great that it just exhausts your spirit and you have to take a timeout to let the ground springs refill the reservoir.  To let the hurt of rejection subside.  And you’ll probably repeat the whole thing again.  Until you succeed.  Or don’t succeed.  It really doesn’t matter which, as far as what you have to do.  Life is not a dress rehearsal.  One take…action!  Or else you go sit with the audience.

“He stopped loving her today… they hung a wreath upon his door.” 

Yeah.  That’s the only way to murder a Muse, if you’re for real.  The only way to kill a true writer.  And it says everything I’ve ever tried to say about the journey itself being the destination.

Thanks for reading along with these columns.  I get a lot of e-mail from people who gave up on their dreams but think their dreams gave up on them.  And speaking of e-mail, I’ve heard from a number of Glenn & Deacon Frey fans that my link to the September column is broken on some of the newsletter mirror sites.  I think that column is being confused with earlier mentions of Glenn and Deacon from 14 months or so ago.  Here’s the correct link to the most recent column:   http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2009/09/16/thomas-sullivan-are-you-ready-for-fame-fortune-%e2%80%94-crosslake-redux-with-glenn-deacon-frey/   

Oh, and another thing.  If it says Comments closed at the end of this column, IGNORE that.  WordPress has a glitch or two and that’s one of them.  Your comments are MOST welcome, and the way to leave them is just to click the title of this column, which will take you to a new page of the column so fast you may not realize it changed.  At the bottom of that column is the posting box for your comments.  If you got here from my newsletter link, you may already see that.

May I invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s fun and won’t intrude on your computer.  2 examples of recent Tweets:  Nothing is easier to take for granted or quickly forgotten than constant magic…until you suddenly realize it isn’t there.   And…  Why is everyone telling me I should write a romance novel? Am I wearing chick-socks or something?  Hey, I can explain. That was Halloween.  Here’s the link:  http://twitter.com/thomassullivan  .  I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for free newsletters packed with stories and adventures, including photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net .  Past newsletters are archived at the author’s website below under News & Articles.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

                                              8  COMMENTS follow

The trouble with Fame & Fortune is that once you reach that destination, it’s very hard to keep the journey going.  You may, in fact, be all through traveling.  You may instead be consigned to rest on your laurels, at best returning to places you’ve already been on the road to success to see things you’ve already seen.  Not that I would know this from personal experience, you understand.  I’ve never reached that rarefied strata where the world seems to love you and money flows in like you’re playing Monopoly.  But you don’t have to reach it in order to discover the pitfalls.  Each royalty check you cash, each autograph you sign is a foretaste of destination and a sudden unexpected grasp of what that means.  It can mean that the plaster cast of who you set out to be is hardening, that you are fixed to a pedestal like a statue, no longer capable of movement, of growth, of being anything but what fans expect and of doing anything except keeping dust, mold and the elements from bringing you down.  There are exceptions.  But they always involve separating the reality of who you are from recognition and reward ($).

Like I said, that’s never been a huge problem for me, because Fame & Fortune on that scale are just having a helluva time finding my address.  Writers in general are blessed with anonymity, and I’m more apt to be recognized in a restaurant for some other notoriety than I am for leaving funny marks on paper.  But that’s not all bad.  I mean, man, I don’t have to wear shades the size of a DC-7 cockpit windshield when I go out.  And I like to remain solitary, picking my moments to soft-shoe through the limelight, then scurrying back to private sanctuaries.  Running into fans/critics in public is almost always an anomaly: the chimneysweep who happens to be reading one of my books when he shows up, the interviewer who calls from Australia and discovers that I wrote something cherished in his library, or — ghastly — biking back from Cro-Hassan county park one morning and finding my first novel in a ditch a zillion miles from nowhere.  So, a lot of my experience with fame rising comes from looking over the shoulders of people who truly are celebs. 

Sometimes those shoulders are very young.  The point at which newly-arrived luminaries gain fame is especially telling for me.  Perspective is never more under assault then and they are never less equipped to handle it.  Some, however, weather the early stages because they understand the danger of becoming a caricature of themselves and shrinking into a cliché as reality slips away by degrees.  Still others jealously guard their private inner island and remain anchored firmly in who they really are.  I remember that Sutton Foster was ready to hang it up and go teach children’s theater somewhere in Middle America a scant week before she landed the role that won her a Tony for best musical actress in “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”  Fame changed her plan, but it didn’t change Sutton.  She is still at heart a mentoring person, as she has been since around the age of 11.  And another young person perhaps on the verge is Deacon Frey, whose father Glenn (co-founder and driving force of the Eagles) has afforded me many insights through musical venues I could not have expected to experience on my own. 

Like pitch-perfect notes coming across an empty lake with sudden clarity, music has focused certain palpable realities for me.  Performing is in fact creating, I believe.  And creating is in fact performing.  Each requires a full soul press, a summoning of all available muses.  You cannot simply remember how you “always do it,” because the moment you rely on that, you become a mere derivative of yourself, a knock-off, a hack, a pale shadow and a weak echo of already dead scenes in your life.  You are creating/performing by rote at that point.  It is too easy to get lost when you create/perform by prescription, to simply forget something in the sequence and to get lost in your own boredom as you sing, play or scroll out words on a screen.  Some people call it writer’s block, creative exhaustion, or an empty well, but by any name it is a lack of Imagination and Inspiration. 

Those are the two “I’s.”  Imagination and Inspiration.  Everyone needs two “I’s.”  Not necessarily a pair of baby blues, but two types of vision for sure: one to see in, one to see out.  And you have to use both kinds of vision if you would be at your best.  You see out to gather information from the world around you; you see in to process it and find meaning.  The Inspiration comes from the external world; the Imagination dwells within you.

I’ve written extensively in these columns about inspiration, because it seems to be a no-go subject that few writers try to work out systematically.  The very idea of systemizing inspiration is a contradiction.  How can you be creative by making inspiration into a formula?  Isn’t that what I just cautioned against in the previous graph – rote vs. full soul press?  It is, and yet you can generalize the circumstances under which you do become inspired, and then you can revisit those inspiring circumstances again and again.  Surround yourself with the things you are passionate about, stand next to magic and perfection as much as you can, and you will take on the color of those surroundings.  Every hour you spend in the company of what excites you will bring out your best and grow you the most.  Unfortunately the reverse is also true.  Every hour you spend compromising your passions shrinks you and puts you in a doze.  Nothing wrong with dozing, I suppose.  Living a sound-soother existence.  Unless you want to hear the music of life instead of just the white noise.  And if you want to actually MAKE music, you really have to love perfection and dwell on inspiration, it seems to me.  Anyway, that’s what I see in my buddy Glenn Frey’s instinctive approach.  And what I see now in Deacon Frey. 

Whatever the struggles and obstacles ahead of him, Deacon Frey already has a wary instinct for perspective.  I got a good look at that during a long weekend at the Manhattan Beach concert in Crosslake, Minnesota, last year.  Deacon was debuting solo and also performing live with his old man in a very loose outdoors venue where logistically speaking just about everything that could go wrong with the weather did.  The sudden short storms that rolled in across the lakes seemed bent on chaos, designed to keep everyone off balance from crew to audience to band.  Promoter/host Jerry Born was understandably apprehensive over the possibility of cancellation, and at one point all the performers (and one shiftless author) fled to an upper room of the lodge to wait out a rain delay.  It should have been a nightmare on the nerves for Deacon, but he kept his cool by keeping his perspective. 

The indecision over the weather after the concert fired up would have been lethal to a lesser performer.  Pressure had been there all day, and chilling out pre-concert with the Family Frey at their residence, I saw the young man deal with it in the context of a laid back family meal on the barbecue, helping set the table, enjoying the conversation, strumming a little on the guitar by himself, and taking in his father’s occasional advice for prepping.  The excitement was already building then — you could feel that — but it didn’t change anything outwardly.  Deacon sat in back when we drove to the concert and set-up every bit the professional.  And when the rains hit and we wound up waiting out the verdict in that closely packed upper room, he really got tested.  All those performance-ready musicians sitting there in the heat and humidity with lightning flickering over the lake, and Deacon not knowing whether his solo debut was going to come off or not — that was the moment when a prima donna would crack, blow-up or lose their edge.  I joked about the Eagles changing their name to the Seagulls, if the rain didn’t let up, and gave him a discourse about rolling thunder in a Sheryl Crow song in an effort to keep him loose, but I might have saved my breath.  Deacon Frey was still outside his own skin.  He had the presence to laugh when it suited him and the courtesy to usher me through a couple of halls to find the room with the porcelain acoustics when I had to tap a kidney (this kid is ready for prime time!), and the easy-going sincerity that marks him 24/7 never faltered. 

In Deacon’s case, he comes by this honestly.  His mother Cindy — herself an accomplished theater alum — is razor sharp about what makes for graciousness and growth.  And Glenn has an uncanny grasp of excellence and what it takes to keep mythical perfection in front of you.  Because if you ever think you’ve caught up with it — in effect, held it in your grasp — you’re all done achieving.  At best you will only repeat yourself after that.  There are a lot of things you can recover from in life, but overreaching probably isn’t one of them.  It’s like a shadow that reappears every time you step into the light.  I’ve seen my share of stage and celebrity disasters, and I’ve come to appreciate that the hardest thing about that level of achievement is keeping a firm hand on who you are while it’s happening.  You must reach for and believe in perfection at the same time that you remember you are not and never will be perfect. 

Probably sounds very effortful if you haven’t thought about all this before, but really it’s just the opposite.  Living with the angst of less than perfection is what is taxing.  If you don’t empathize with that, either you’ve never reached your potential for inspiration or you may be in the wrong line of work.  I’m always amazed to listen as Glenn and his manager Tommy Nixon (the Lone Star Texan) or Jerry Vaccarino dissect a concert from the night before.  What sounded flawless to me at midnight may be the subject of considerable debate the next day, as they parse out every phase of a program.  It is always a revelation and a renewal of light on my own creative efforts to realize how nuanced an artist must be in pursuit of perfection.

So the quest for Fame & Fortune without the underlying perspective of what’s truly important ultimately becomes a dead-end (i.e. Is that all there is?).  You tell yourself that recognition is your motivation — candidly admit it — but if you aren’t a serious perfection junkie for its own sake, a lover of inspiration, a passion-head at some level, you probably won’t find fulfillment or satisfaction in mere F&F.  You can’t farm out your worth to an audience.  Just sayin’. 

No one knows Deacon Frey’s destination, or his journey.  But in or out of creative enterprise, he’s already won something major.  He’s kept his perspective under fire.  Whatever obstacles, setbacks and challenges await him, you can’t take that away from him.  He knows the way.  If he ever gets lost in the process of growing up, he won’t have to reinvent himself, he’ll just have to find his way home…

May I invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s fun and unintrusive.  Here’s the link:  http://twitter.com/thomassullivan .  I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for free newsletters packed with stories and adventures, including photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net .  Past newsletters are archived at the website below.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan    

[If you’d like to see a sample of my fiction, a new short story, “Case White,” is out in the #60 issue of Cemetery Dance and is already receiving recommendations for a Stoker Award.  Here's the link: http://www.cemeterydance.com/page/CDP/PROD/_cd060  .  And the opening chapter from my novel THE WATER WOLF is on my website.] 

Thomas Sullivan

If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Comments

Comment by Robert Jones on September 16, 2009 @ 9:20 am

You have exposed yet another investment that often pays large dividends, namely, revisiting inspiring circumstances. It doesn’t have to be a merely repetitive exercise. There will always be something different. If one is alert to that fact, s/he can often find new perspectives. Thank you, amigo, for reminding us where there are replenishing springs within a sometimes seemingly arid desert.

Among the fine daguerrotypes accompanying your newsletter, the picture of the snarl of trees at waters edge is most interesting to me because it evokes a different response every time I look at it and triggers changing responses while I’m looking at it. In your unplug, you wrote, “stand next to magic and perfection as much as you can, and you will take on the color of those surroundings.” Your picture is a subtle but exquisite example. I recommend that readers look it for a time and observe the varying thoughts that run through their minds.

Amalgam

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on September 16, 2009 @ 9:31 am

You know, I think you’ve put your finger on the active part of inspiration. It doesn’t depend so much on what’s outside a person as it does on the person’s ability to respond to it. You can’t just sit in front of life and be a spectator. You have to train your mind to see things, associate, analyze… Thanks for that, Amalgam, and for your kind comments.

Yeah, that photo of the gnarled trees was from one of the islands in Burntside Lake. Spooky and spectacular. Anyone who reads my newsletters in formats that don’t replicate the photos can e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net and I’ll send you the real McCoy each month.

Sully

Comment by Janet on September 16, 2009 @ 4:30 pm

There you go again. Just when I think I’m too tired and too doped up to think, you force it upon me. Thank you for that, Friend.

As a P,S,, This week our buddy Rick suffered his 8th stroke. Incredible that he’s still with us and can talk. Bob calls him daily.

Much love, Janet

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on September 16, 2009 @ 4:39 pm

Very disturbing about Rick, but thanks for the info. I gather that the strokes are minimal. One hopes he hangs onto his ability to think and express. That is essentially the only thing each of us is, not just as people but as writers in particular.

And your own capacities are of such a magnitude that a little fatigue and chemical obstacles don’t stand a chance against the tide of thoughts, ideas, memories and musings. Bestest,

Sully

Comment by anne on September 16, 2009 @ 4:41 pm

Sully,

You’ve hit the jackpot of perfection here. Your 2 “i”s (eyes) thoughts are brilliant. They inspire life whether it is writing or any passionate pursuit of excellence. Your encompassing example of how your surround yourself with magic( the concert and watching a young artist be born) echo back the inspiration and imagination theme. It is reverberating the two “i”s simultaneously and it impossible to see which is on the inside or outside. It’s akin to an imagination tranfusion. Thanks for the energy.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on September 16, 2009 @ 4:50 pm

Well, what goes around comes around, Anne, because I wish I’d written it the way you did. Always gratifying when someone posts back with such total grasp. “Imagination transfusion” is now in my personal dictionary of phrases. Will try to live up to that, and also receive transfusions of my own from whatever enters my life. Thanks, and write on…

Sully

Comment by Trish on September 17, 2009 @ 10:10 pm

Thank-you for taking the time to be a part of Story Tellers. You always manage to inspire.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on September 17, 2009 @ 10:15 pm

Of course, the thing that keeps people going who try to inspire is the inspiration they get from kind readers who take the trouble to let them know. Thanks, Trish…

Sully

If this column goes anywhere — and bear in mind that no one has ever accused me of writing from a plan — I hope it leads to this conclusion: EVERY GREAT MUSICIAN WHO CREATES THEIR OWN SONGS IS A WRITER AT HEART, AND EVERY GREAT WRITER IS A MUSICIAN. Now, I’m no kind of great writer, and I’m all the way around the world from being a great musician, but you don’t have to be either in order to read and listen to greatness. And before I launch into this, I’d better connect some dots from the last few months.

The first part of this series [ http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2008/07/16/thomas-sullivan-cross-lake-glenn-frey-breathing-the-sky/ ] appeared here two months ago after a sterling three-day weekend when Glenn & family invited me up to pristinely beautiful Crosslake, Minnesota, where he was giving a concert. The crossovers between books and music inspired a lot of things I started to share with you. The reason the second part was delayed was so that I could write about the life and death and hereafter of author Franklin T. Wydra, who died on August 2. If Flamingo Frank was larger than life — and he was — then he is certainly larger than death: [http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2008/08/16/thomas-sullivan-flamingo-frank-2/]. People are still reading that column, still responding. If you would like to see more about Frank, including photos of the pink flamingo I planted in the deep wilds of Elm Creek to honor him, here is a link to last month’s newsletter: http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/newsletters/08162008.htm

So returning now to Crosslake and the Manhattan Beach concert. How do you hide on a vibrating stage in the middle of a Glenn Frey set? Answer, you blend with the night air behind the soundboard, and that’s where I got this for the newsletter two months ago: “When a song stops, tsunamis roar over the stage.” But that’s not precisely correct. The tsunami of approval from the audience generally starts in the closing chord. It is the same tsunami that rose briefly in recognition at the start of the song. The recognition can come after even a single note, and I find that amazing. Amazing and informative when it comes to understanding what turns on readers/listeners and why.

Al Garth — one of Glenn’s versatile and key musicians — said he didn’t know about just one note when we were talking about this in the middle of the night after the show, but I beg to differ. I’m not enough of a musician to know or to sort through terms that are only vaguely comprehensible to me — pitch, timbre, etc. — I just know that there are an infinite number of nuances the human ear can pick up, and that recognizing them is what it’s all about in music. Why is that? Why aren’t songs like books where you hear/read them once and that’s basically it? Why does a song bear repetition? Why do I listen endlessly to something like The Cranberries “Dreams” or Duffy’s “Mercy” (yeah, I know, ‘cause I’m nuts)? It is ritual for me to pull up the official music videos of these on YouTube every night and let them flow through my veins like a drug. There is a huge clue in that repetition factor for writers.

The simple difference is that music is primarily a sensory experience and reading is primarily abstract. But sense and sensibility are like two outtakes of the same scene, each delivering information. In being sensory music informs the emotions, whereas reading mostly informs the rational mind. Still, good writing has to reach the emotions, of course, and the fact that music succeeds by repeating sounds makes me wonder if writers can’t achieve the same thing in their own way. True, we may never have that out-loud sensory link, but if the words evoke the images and trigger the feelings, the reader will get there. We can’t just inform, we have to arouse. Instead of notes we use silent abstractions, so we are never going to have a direct feed into the senses, but we have all day to take the reader there. We are less confined by structure. We can create more complex descriptions and a deeper analysis. And if music has it both ways — that is, it can use both its own sonorous form and our wordplay and storytelling — writers can use qualities that music has as well. Great writing has meter and rhythm and balance and repetition for emphasis. Alliteration is music. Onomatopoeia is a sensory experience. Rhetorical writing that goes for the music lover and gains that lucky niche where it can be read multiple times for enjoyment alone has a name. It’s called poetry. And maybe this is another way of saying that even prose should rise to some level of poetic form if it wants to reach full potential as communication. I’m not talking arty-farty stuff, I’m just saying that anything beyond the level of a shop manual written in Taiwan should pay attention to the silent music of words.

Like I said, Every great musician who creates their own songs is a writer at heart, and every great writer is a musician. They meet at the corner of Meter and Metaphor. It’s poetry by a lesser name. Call it music’s cousin.

Thinking and feeling, feeling and thinking. A drink and a chaser. Hmmm. Lots of substance abuse imagery here. Maybe I should issue a disclaimer that I don’t do drugs and almost never drink (what the hell’s wrong with me). Is that why I like books and music? Substitutions for wild rides through potent feelings and unbounded imagination? Anyway, regarding thinking and feeling, should one come first in presentation? Do they need each other? Instrumental music is pure sensation and doesn’t need thought, so I guess feeling can be enough. On the other hand it’s hard to imagine fiction simply delivering thoughts and being successful. The thoughts have to lead to emotional impact on the reader.

Oops! Didn’t mean to stiff the lyricist’s role in music. Great stories and hammering lines are the scaffolds of music from The Phantom of the Opera to Desperado. But it’s also true that you can get away with much less in the way of wordsmythery or even fundamental coherency and still have a great song. In fact, melodic delivery trumps sense almost any time it becomes an issue. Sing “Light my fire, light my fire, light my fire…” 63 times in succession or “Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa” and nothing more need be said to explain it, “Oop poo pah do,” thank you very much. And for sure music often evokes the “soul” of character by deliberately using unsophisticated language, “Da doo ron ron.” It uses the grunts and belches of passion to be real, “Do wah diddy diddy.” To be informal is to be human. Listeners who don’t get that are usually just missing the point as well as the experience. You see the same thing with dialogue in fiction or with an informal narrator. But still, there are countless examples of clumsy lyrics in music, even in great songs. Just as the music of words tends to get shorted by fiction writers, so too the lyricist often shorts the logic of words. You want I should start an argument with an example? Yeah, here we are in the Roman Colosseum…okay, I’m game.

But let me do it by segueing back to the Crosslake concert where the context for all this began. A couple songs in at Manhattan Beach the rains came and I fled with Glenn and the band to a large secluded room in the lodge. When The Maestro is building magic and passion with the audience like Glenn does, to be cut off like that is a lot like coitus interruptus. So, with several thousand people out there waiting to see if the concert would resume, it was a little tense as well as humid and gloomy in that upstairs room. Naturally I lapped it up. Nothing attracts and inspires me more than the unexpected. So I’m soaking up the panoramic view of brambles of lightning and storm clouds scudding across the lake, and when Deacon — Glenn’s 15-year-old son who was debuting vocally that night — mentioned something about lyrics, a connection with the storm popped out of my mouth. “You don’t want to think too hard about what makes sense in a pop song,” I said. “Like Sheryl Crow’s Good Is Good. Terrific song but — hey — ‘And every time you hear the rolling thunder, turn around before the lightning strikes’? Man, by the time you hear the rolling thunder, you’re already toast. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second while sound travels about 1100 feet. Do the math. Zap…rumble, rumble. Lightning wins by a mile. Actually 185,599+ miles or the rate thereof.”

Okay, argue with me. But like I said, you don’t want to think too hard about it. And that’s the point. It’s beyond poetic license. Precise logic is simply not the focus for an emotional medium like music. Great lyrics or bad, the standard does not require either, and grammar is not an option. Do the same thing in a novel (and there are lots of examples of this), and you’ll find the stakes for “sense” less forgiving. You can hide behind an informal first-person narrator, but the grammar police are on duty just waiting for you to step across the POV, which as we all know stands for Plane Old Vernacular.

To be sure, this isn’t a group dynamic that separates all musicians from all writers. There is a mystique about it that changes with each artist. Mystique. That’s another word that came up at Crosslake. We kibitzed around about that all weekend. Despite infrequent contacts, Glenn and I feel we know each other core deep in unique ways. Musician and writer. Synonyms , sort of. Given our career fortunes, I styled us The Mystique & The Mistake, but hopefully (for me) there’s a better term — a bridge word. Or a phrase. Students of life. That’s the connection. And yet the mystique is there. Something unsolvable in the imagination and personality of the artist. Have known Glenn to be a businessman, philosopher, philanthropist, creative artist, performance artist, art collector, athlete, husband, father and teacher. The same high standards he has in other areas come across in a genius for organization. He can delegate, and that’s a secret for large-scale empires à la Walt Disney — the ability to pick good people. He has a gift for that. Comes across in every choice he makes in musicians and all other things. But he’s hands-on when it comes to interacting with the world around him. Crosslake was just one of many beautiful settings that he draws inspiration from. Yet, no matter how much you see the method and the man, you can never delve the true source of uniqueness and creativity. It’s almost spooky. Ignore that man behind the curtain.

But look for the mirror. You can learn a lot about your own creativity by looking at someone else’s. And I’ve left a lot in the mirror still, so I’ll try to come back to this at some future column. Love these searches into excellence, and I wouldn’t want to leave a horizon unexplored. The Eagles hit the Target Center in St. Paul September 30^th..  These guys are immortal. But what do you expect with anthems like Take It to the Limit? Hope that’s on the playlist.

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see more of my work, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website.  And I’ll be happy to e-mail you a free newsletter every month with similar rants about life and writing, plus photos of whatever I’m writing about.  Send your e-mail address and you’re on the list.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/

Friday the 13^th of June was a lucky day for me.  That was the start of a three-day weekend on Cross Lake, Minnesota, as a guest of Glenn Frey.  The friendship goes back 20 years now, and though our muses have different addresses and our histories follow different maps, we are brothers in the ether.  His muse glides elegantly from one success to the next; mine lives in the woods and sweats a lot.  His maps cover the Seven Wonders of the World; mine cover one-way streets and dead ends.  Still, I like to think the differences highlight the similarities.  We’ve come to the same universal truths by different roads.  Universal truths…essential material for any artist.  Moreover from the beginning we instantly recognized each other’s style.  Styles. 

That yields up a lot of relevant insights for me, some of which I’ll try to deliver here.  Yeah, Glenn’s is in part performance art whereas writing books is abstract, but peeking over a shoulder (or wing in the case of the Eagles) at what is arguably the most successful musical phenomenon of all time has afforded me information I could never have otherwise gleaned.  Glenn started the Eagles and they have always born his stamp of independence and individualism.  To me that is almost synonymous with endurance in the arts.  It can also be alienating, particularly in an age where media hype is essential to recognition.  Fail to pay homage to the gatekeepers, and you are probably doomed to obscurity.  Do it your way, and you will very likely do it alone.  But Glenn Frey and the Eagles have certainly done it their way and they are anything but alone.  So say the fans.  What other musical legends could have made and set records starting in the early 70s, disbanded and resurrected themselves in the early 90s to set more records, left that last millennium with the #2 and #5 best-selling CDs of the 20th century (the only musical entity to have two in the top five), then come back in 2007 with their first totally new material in 37 years debuting #1 and going almost instantly Platinum seven times?  The new CD, which was not released until late October and sold only through Wal-Mart, ended up the top album of the year for a US group.  Moreover, each of the Eagles has had a successful solo career, though I believe Glenn is the only one to chart #2, which he did twice (“Heat Is On” and “You Belong to the City”).  Clearly the fans — new and old — continue to find them.  So one of the revelations I’ve taken from our friendship is that of the two tracks to success in entertainment — media hype and grassroots recognition — only the latter produces enduring acceptance.  Fans trump.

An interesting conversation in the middle of the night after the Manhattan Beach concert with Al Garth, one of Glenn’s key band members, left me flat out astonished that he didn’t seem to entirely grasp the scope of his impact as part of the Eagles.  In a very scaled-down and relative way I’ve found this blind-sidedness to be true in my own humble career and generally in the careers of other writers, but — hey — we’re talking performance art vs. abstract art here.  All those fans pulsing energy at a stage bathed in shifting rainbows has to be some kind of affirmation, I thought.  As a rule readers don’t wave glow sticks at writers, and when someone says, “Oh, you’re the author,” I’ve learned that the appropriate response is, “It’s too late to get your money back.”  This was the first time I’ve actually been on stage during a performance, and even tucked beneath an awning and behind a soundboard you get a sense of what the musicians must be feeling:

The air is charged.  The audience is like an ocean held back by magical incantations that come from strings and reeds and the dynamics of a mesmerizing voice.  What surprised me was the vibration.  The stage practically levitates you.  The next time my feet ache I want to stand on a couple dozen amps each the size of my car.  When the vibration stops, tsunamis roar over the stage.  The heat from the lights seems suddenly to leave a chill and the figures in the aura are momentarily inanimate, like batteries drawing current.  Glenn holds the plug and keys the switch.  I see a friend whose inner space I know but who is also a stranger made bigger than life by some potent spell he has cast.  The spell’s thrall includes himself, as if he is channeling whatever muses he has called forth from all the thunder and lightning of his life.  His blood has been replaced by adrenaline and he is breathing the sky.  His senses are honed and lucid in a way that only those who create and perform can recognize.  He is playing the pauses.  The audience is unified into one listener.  He can and does speak to it with a single intimate voice.  The musicians are an integral part of that voice by extension.  Key the switch…

So how is it that the Al Garths and you and I and even Glenn Frey cannot necessarily appreciate the impact of our work?  Why do brilliant writers like Wayne Allen Sallee, Janet Berliner and Richard Steinberg despair?

Maybe it’s the fact that we’re on the supply side of entertainment, or that we look in the mirror and see the person behind the curtain, or that we create in a vacuum, or that we tend to focus on what’s missing in fulfilling our goals, or maybe it’s because of the isolation that surrounds many entertainers — contrary to what most fans believe.  The very recognition that people suppose creates access is in fact a barrier.  And when that barrier is stormed, the person behind it usually has to fulfill an expectation rather than the reality of who they are.  It is a very lonely and guarded business beneath the surface, and one in which you can easily get lost. 

In the conversation with Al Garth I could empathize with the artist who is vulnerable to whatever media attention or apathy defines them, but I could also present myself as the fan who sees that his own most intense emotions and meaningful memories are evoked by happenings like a Glenn Frey concert or an Eagles song or a powerful novel.  The barriers all come down then.  For the performance artist it feeds off an audience, as Glenn illustrated that night at Manhattan Beach.  The thing I want to underscore is that entertainment can express the very soul of a fan in a way that is life altering.  You just can’t know how much impact or influence it has when you’re on the supply side.  And that — notwithstanding that the Eagles have unprecedented critical success that speaks for more than one era — is their real success.  Ultimately it’s the real success for any artist.  Connecting with emotions, especially at the core.

I guess it’s tougher to do with a book, simply because you don’t have direct sensory input.  Writers are stuck with abstract symbols.  But then again, great songs score with great lyrics that stand alone too.  I’m going to try singing my next book.  What do you think, light opera, tighten my belt and sing falsetto, slum it (Sully Winehouse — Whinehouse)?  Not pretty.  On the other hand, I want to hear Glenn sing a song in braille.  Every art form has its limitations and advantages.

And I think I’m closing in on the length limitation for this column.  It’s telling me to turn it into a two-parter.  So be it.  I’ll pull this one together with the general observation that a couple of writing elements made the Manhattan Beach concert particularly magical: settings and characters.  So… 

Settings: spent half of one night on the shores of Island Lake and Cross Lake, or as I described in one of the post responses to last month’s column: “… catching storm cells gusting in from the west with rumbles and flashes, standing in the wind on a dam whose concrete fingers billowed up silver water in the moonlight, and discovering gossamer mists and foxfire in its hollows at dawn…”  Beauty may only be in the eye of the beholder, but you get a lot of help from nature in that area of Minnesota. 

Characters: have to give that honor to those two scene-stealers Deacon and Otis Lincoln Douglas Frey, Glenn and Cindy’s two sons.  I believe they are best known for clearing out all the fish from Loon Lake while standing barely 30 feet from the house.  But thousands of fans at the concert can testify to 15-year-old Deacon blowing them away with his rockin’ guitar and vocals.  Ditto for Otis, age 6, on the tambourine.  Otis comes with his own backup, little Kaylee, also 6.  Hell, Otis comes with his own universe.  I guess that makes him an artist already.  To be continued…

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see more of my work, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website.  And I’ll be happy to e-mail you a free newsletter every month with similar rants about life and writing, plus photos of whatever I’m writing about.  Just send me your e-mail address.    

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/

My mind went on a diet a while ago and already it’s lost nearly 1800 words.  It started by eliminating all those empty adjectives and adverbs that just pile bulk on the body of my work without any real nutrition.  Then it tossed out the interjections (pure comfort words – WOW! huh?).  You’re allowed substitutions on this diet, and so next went a bunch of nouns, replaced by less rich pronouns.  I feel much better now.  I have more energy and I can think non-stop without running out of imagination.  My inner, slimmer brain that was buried under layers of useless prose has been liberated!

Call it the thinking man’s diet.  Throwing away something you’ve slaved long and hard over may seem counterintuitive, but sometimes you get addition by subtraction that way.  More and more I find myself inclined to focus energy on eliminating the bad in order to clear the way for the good.  It used to feel wrong to do that.  When I threw my hard work away, I thought I had lost something.  All that time, effort, and most of all hope, seemed like too much of an investment to walk away from.  But then I realized that the reason it wasn’t going anywhere was because it was finished.  That approach had gone as far as it could, and it wasn’t going to get any better.  To keep trying to patch it into perfection was like making a joke of it and of myself.  So it wasn’t a blasphemy to move on; on the contrary, it was a blasphemy to stay mired in something fundamentally flawed.  I was agonizing over a limitation I had outgrown. 

But beyond that, I got better at understanding what perfection would look like.  Now, complete perfection isn’t going to happen to the likes of me.  Nor would I want it to, because then I’d stop growing.  There is, however, a basic threshold of potential you have to have if you’re reaching for your best.  You have to have the right idea, the right vision for moving that idea, and all the necessary elements on hand to see it through.  And sometimes you don’t discover those things until you choose the wrong things first.  By making some wrong choices, you come to recognize what isn’t a mistake.  Then what you need is simply the courage to start over.  That’s the personal part I had to learn.  Maybe it was just pride in what I had already begun that was holding me back, maybe it was part ego, part vanity, but in any case I had to recognize the dead end and shift my motivation toward a better result.  You might never fully attain the perfection you want, but you can start with those undiluted and uncompromised three things: idea, vision, and the essential elements on hand to pull it off.  

You might use different words for those labels I’ve chosen.  Some other words for idea are: inspiration, catalyst, stimulation, ideal and model.  By vision I mean the inner certainty you have gained through life that you can make the right judgments as you act on your idea (hint: if the idea is inspiring enough, the judgments will be easier).  Essential elements are the specific material you have to work with: plot, characters, setting.  The quality of what you start with has everything to do with where you end up.  Whatever terms you use, there is no greater feeling than being on a journey toward something really good.  To hold the essential clay of perfection in your hand and know you have a chance to shape it to your ideal — that’s electrifying.  Respect that above all!  It justifies who you are.  It can motivate you and balance out the flawed things that eat up the rest of your life.  

But first you have to slim down your brain.

If I hadn’t been afraid of making mistakes, I think I would have gotten on the right track a lot sooner.  I wasted vital years hanging onto efforts that were exhausted.  Something cowed me into submission.  Maybe it was fear of failure, maybe it was too much pride in what I thought I had going for me.  It just seemed like my words were too bad to keep and too good to throw away. When I started to see them as finished, I was able to clear the palate and escape what was holding me back.    

Hang on, this is about to turn into one of my Cannibal Essays.  You may remember the format from the column  http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/09/16/thomas-sullivan-ky-jelly-the-headless-squirrel/ .  The idea was to try to inspire people, writers or not, to see the stories and the lessons in their lives.  For me that often happens in nature.  The point about not being afraid to make mistakes came to me as I was hiking in a 5600-acre nature preserve named Elm Creek the other day.  After crossing a quaint old wooden bridge in a remote section, I came upon an ear-splitting chorus of croakers in a pond so weedy and turbulent it looked like boiling rhubarb.  Every frog that Kermit ever knew was having shameless sex.  Which is sort of like tag-team wrestling.  All right, it was an orgy.  Under and over the weeds they struggled in randy pursuit, ambushing each other with triumphant leaps that ended in bronco-busting tussles.  It soon became apparent that the missionary position wasn’t going to work well for frogs.  And it also became clear that the little green critters weren’t all that accurate at telling male from female.  But that didn’t stop them from trying all of the above.  Equate sex with creativity (oh, man, do I want to go there) and you’ve got it.  The creative drive can’t max out if you don’t explore the right avenue.  Whether it is procreation or just creation, you are shooting blanks when you stick with a dead end.  Nature isn’t afraid to make mistakes and then to move on.  That’s how things get better in the whole scheme of evolution and successful survival, and that’s what I’m talking about here in the growth and success of a writer.

I never did get whether all that amphibian sex was connected with another phenomenon when I was exploring Elm Creek that day, but it did give me a second metaphor for writers.  A half dozen tiny birds were going crazy nearby.  They were popping off some overhanging branches and performing whigged-out stunts like acrobats on meth.  They had to be scoffing down insects in mid-air, but I couldn’t see the blue plate special.  According to a book in my library the black-feathered phenoms with pale orange decals on their fuselages and tails are American redstarts and this time of year the no-seeums are hatching out.  Anyway, it struck me that writers aren’t a whole lot different in their mental gyrations.  We work in a vacuum.  And like those birds staring into seemingly empty air to see what only they can see and performing acrobatic leaps and loops from their vantage points to find food one insect at a time, we stare at empty screens and snatch nourishment for the soul out of thin air one word at a time.  We get to play God a little more than the average person.  Yes, all people define their lives, all people become self-fulfilling prophecies.  But more than most, writers can use their imaginations to shape their lives.  If we tend to be mavericks, it’s at least in part because of that mental power.  We do not live behind the same façades as everyone else, sanctioned and endorsed and even defined by the expectations around us.  We invent what’s right.  We might get it wrong at the start, but we work at it with will and imagination until our passion becomes reality.  And that just kicks down the door to possibilities.  Making mistakes is part of the process.  And maybe mistake isn’t the right word for what I’m trying to describe.  Maybe I mean aiming too low, or underestimating what you need, or starting with an idea, vision and elements that can’t go the distance.  But it’s a definite mistake to not recognize when you do.  And it’s a colossal mistake to hang onto the debris of the wrong choice.  Put your mind on a diet.  You deserve to like the person in the mirror.  It’s one thing to reach for your star, it’s quite another to aim for mediocrity.

There is another nature story to this piece, if you are interested.  It involved an act of courage and trust that inspired me to address this topic.  I put it in my newsletter, which comes out simultaneously with this column each month.  Some photos of the frog sex pond and bird-launching area are also included there, along with the notorious Dr. Foto’s latest blasphemy, and some photos from a spectacular weekend I just spent up at Cross Lake, Minnesota.  As I wrote in the newsletter this month, for many years I’ve enjoyed an extraordinary friendship with an extraordinary man and his extraordinary family.  Glenn Frey of the Eagles has more facets than the Hope diamond, and when he invited me up to Cross Lake, I knew it was going to be a hoot with philosophical overtones.  Adding to the warmth and meaningfulness we always share was the fact that his wife Cindy and two sons, Deacon and Otis Lincoln Douglas (you got that right — and this six-year-old has the pz-zazz to back that handle up!), and father-in-law Jerry, who can barbecue his way into Hell’s Kitchen, were all there.  Deacon stole the limelight at the outdoor concert with his rockin’ guitar and vocals on some of his old man’s hits like “Hotel California.”  Not to mention that Otis made his bid to insert “Tambourine Man” on the playlist.  Three days of beautiful vistas on the lake, exquisite people, great food, a million laughs and pranks, music to tame the masses, and scintillating conversation.  Having the privilege of looking over someone’s shoulder at the high end of another creative art form has afforded me more than a few relevant insights, and the Cross Lake happening was no exception.  I’m going to try and write about that next month.  Count on it.

Meanwhile, past newsletters are being archived at the website below (and usually go up sometime during the day that this column comes out), but I’ll be glad to send you one once a month if you e-mail me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net.  

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see more of my work, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website.     

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/