That process by which you become a writer is a pretty lonely one. We don't have a group apprenticeship like a violinist might training for an orchestra.
My wife Elizabeth and I started The Really Terrible Orchestra for people like us who are pretty hopeless musicians who would like to play in an orchestra. It has been a great success. We give performances; we've become the most famous bad orchestra in the world.
My wife Elizabeth and I started The Really Terrible Orchestra for people like us who are pretty hopeless musicians who would like to play in an orchestra. It has been a great success. We give performances; weve become the most famous bad orchestra in the world.
And over the last ten years, after my work with the Brodsky Quartet, I had the opportunity to write arrangements for chamber group, chamber orchestra, jazz orchestra, symphony orchestra even.
One of the things I learnt over the years is that there is a craft to writing, like there is a craft to acting. I hadn't done my apprenticeship as a writer. I did try to be a writer for hire but I'm not any good at it.
I got into hairdressing and moved from Dorset to London, where I got an apprenticeship at Vidal Sassoon. This was around '83 or '84. I was working on South Molton Street, which was then the epicenter of all the shops. It was like a catwalk. So I did my apprenticeship there, but I wasn't successful.
It might work with one orchestra, and the next orchestra - the oboe player might not get it. It's different every time, but some of the orchestras do end up enjoying it and having a great time.
Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language, making the creative process something like eavesdropping at a party for which you've had the fun of drawing up the guest list. Loneliness usually doesn't set in until the work is finished, and all the partygoers and their imagined universe have disappeared.
There are plenty of books that tell you how to become a writer, but not one that suggests how, if you want a normal life, you might reverse the process.
There is no substitute under the heavens for productive labor. It is the process by which dreams become realities. It is the process by which idle visions become dynamic achievements.
I never thought that I would write orchestra music, but in fact I did write a group of orchestra pieces.
For Beatrice, when we first met, I was lonely, and you were pretty. Now I am pretty lonely.
It's like a little folk song. I think it might've been Harry Belafonte or someone like that who did it. And "Merry Christmas, Everybody" by Slade, which is a rock group - a rock-pop group who are very big over there.
I tend to think that the onus is on the writer to engage the reader, that the reader should not be expected to need the writer, that the writer has to prove it. All that stuff might add up to a kind of fun in the work. I like things that are about interesting subjects, which sounds self-evident.
Every one of Joel's important songs--including the happy ones--are ultimately about loneliness. And it's not 'clever lonely' (like Morrissey) or 'interesting lonely' (like Radiohead); it's 'lonely lonely,' like the way it feels when you're being hugged by someone and it somehow makes you sadder.
To choose a writer for a friend is like palling around with your cardiologist, who might be musing as you talk to him that you are a sinking man. A writer's love for another writer is never quite free of malice. He may enjoy discussing your failures even more than you do. He probably sees you as tragic, like his characters - or unworthy of tragedy, which is worse.
The musical training taught me to focus my mind, before playing in an orchestra taught me how to truly concentrate. If you miss your moment in an orchestra, there is no forgiving.