A Brief Musical Interlude

In those brief, fleeting moments of my life that I laughingly refer to as "my spare time" I'm currently learning to play the guitar. It's fair to say progress is slow, but I enjoy it very much. I guess I know, ooh, about 10 chords now and sometimes I can even string them together in roughly the right order to play what you might call, if you were both generous and hard of hearing, a song.

I was going to write a post describing the parallels between guitar-playing and writing. You know the sort of thing. How you have to learn the basics of the craft before you can fly off and make the artistry soar. How the trick is to make all the pain and effort involved seem painless and effortless. How you get sore fingers.

But I'm sure you get all that. So instead, for your delight and entertainment, here's a brief snatch of me playing a few bars of lead guitar. It's pretty ropey. But that's fine; I strive for recognizability rather than virtuosity. Can you tell what it is?




I know, I know. I just have to hope that my writing is better than my guitar playing. The thing is though, what you hear there is a long way from a first take. It's actually several different attempts stitched together. I had to replay the riff numerous times in order to get it even vaguely right. I had to do it again and again and again. Even then, it could obviously do with more polishing.

See where I'm going with this? I've turned it into a point about writing after all. Because writing fiction is just the same, is it not? To make it sound beautiful and flowing I'd have had to put lots more work into it, keep on reworking it and improving it. Because making something seem effortless can sometimes take a lot of effort.

Oh, and in case it was completely unrecognizable, that was a bit of Day Tripper by The Beatles. I know I should have done Paperback Writer really. Thing is, I haven't learned that one yet ...