By Obie Yadgar
I learned not to force the writing with my first novel Will’s Music. Forcing led to indecision and confusion. Killer frustration. The more I pushed the worse it got, until my brain froze. It took a while to figure out the answer: I found myself in an imaginary rocking chair and a piece of wood to whittle until I had the story.
The junk burned itself out and the good clustered into a usable narrative. The writing either bumped along like a peg-legged pirate or floated on an easy stream of words to the finish.
That’s how it happened with the writing of Will’s Music, soon to be published by Figlo Press. It took me a year to write it, working seven days a week. At the time I hosted a weekday morning classical music radio program in Chicago and was on the air from 6 a.m. until noon. After the show I wrote until suppertime, and afterwards until about 10 p.m., then up at 4 a.m. and another full day.
By the last part of the book my fountain pen and laptop raced to keep up with the words poring out of me. It was a battle to remember economy of words. My days were exhausting. I was wiped out. But I kept on, day in and day out. I loved every moment spent on the book. Had I not forced myself to go to bed so that I would not crow on the air the next morning, I would have written through the night.
Then Will’s Music was finished. A whole year of writing. Thousands of words, not counting thousands cut out. Three drafts. It was done. The End. I was ecstatic and proud of myself. Nothing had stood in my way. At the same time I felt sad, empty, as if those dearest to me had been torn away. Yes, the characters in Will’s Music, my friends who told me every word to write were no longer with me. They were gone. We had spent a year together, all of us, chattering away, agreeing, disagreeing, hugging or banging heads. Then nothing. They were gone and I was alone with only sweet memories.
Will’s Music took several years to develop, and by the time I began writing it I had whittled a pile of wood in my rocking chair. The novel started as a short story in the 1960s, in San Francisco. I had just returned from a tour of duty in Vietnam as a U.S. Army combat correspondent. Ah, those were exciting times in the city. Colorful times. Haight-Ashbury was a hippy paradise. Fillmore East, Grateful Dead, anti war marches — life spun along in every direction.
I worked as a clerk and messenger for a small shipping company in downtown San Francisco. A salesman in the office named Jose was a former professional dancer. He had been part of a dancing duo that worked some of the big hotel ballrooms around the country, including the famed Edgewater Beach in Chicago. As I had worked at the hotel for a short time as a busboy, at a different period, of course, his recollections of dancing to Xavier Cougat’s band or some of the other big names fascinated me.
Toward the end of my career as a San Francisco wanderer and messenger, just before landing an announcing gig with a National Public Radio station in St. Louis, I began a short story loosely based on elements in Jose’s life. There was a wealth of material from his life to choose from and it all tugged at me. Despite every attempt to hone my focus, I drifted from one direction to another, depending on how the wind blew.
Ironically, too, that by the third or the fourth paragraph the male protagonist in the story would turn into a female. What’s this? What’s this? It was a strange metamorphosis and it puzzled me. What on earth was going on with this character? I was not sure at the time, but looking back, I can now see the character worked better as a female and I did not have enough artistic sense at the time to accept the change and adapt. I grew confused. Frustrated.
I pushed to get the story right, to stop drifting and to stay on track, but that only added to my final defeat. I suppose I could have dumped the story after a while and moved on to something else, but I loved it too much, as it proved to be the case many years later when writing it. In the end I had to admit to myself that something was wrong with my approach to the story, something was not clicking, and with all the pushing and the shoving I was sinking deeper into the creative hole I had dug for myself.
I stepped back from Jose’s story and moved on. By then I was heading to St. Louis and the start of my radio career. Yet through the years Jose’s story stayed with me. It was always there, haunting me, dancing in the back of my head. It headed in its own direction and I followed. By then the metamorphosis was complete: Jose’s character was a beautiful and intriguing woman. I had already established the novel’s male protagonist. Also many of the secondary characters, although more joined the gang in the following drafts.
Then one day I uncapped my fountain pen and began to write Will’s Music:
William Shakespeare Baskin, failed playwright, believed that if you must detour in your life, slip behind the radio microphone for the best of all possible paths. That you don’t see the audience made radio even magical, a lot like sweet-talking your girlfriend from behind a closed door, where if you say and do the right things, you have her purring like a Mozart sonata . . .
