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Thursday, March 29, 2012

Jazz Writing – Pretty Cool if You Can Handle It. Ya Dig?


Over the last 3 days, in between all of my other duties at work, I have been working on an article. The content doesn’t matter for this post; it was the process that intrigued me. 
On Tuesday I didn’t have a feel for the angle or arc of the story I was telling but I was on a short deadline so I wrote some all-purpose paragraphs that could be used pretty much anywhere in the text.  On Wednesday I attended an event that would be the subject for the article which I had written in regards to in generalities on Tuesday.  After Wednesday when I sat at the keyboard Thursday morning the story was more clearly defined and I wrote an introduction that set the stage and moved some of Tuesdays paragraphs around to fill it out.  I planned to tie it all together Thursday afternoon after teaching but when I checked my email at lunch I learned that the article was finished. 
It was pretty cool.  I read the email and the finished draft and saw that all of the things I would have had to work to say were said.  The other author saw the framework I had established, riffed off of some of the melodies I had laid down and set the hook to real our audience in with a line cast by the rhythm of our shared experience at Wednesdays excursion.  It was like writing in jazz and it was cool man.  

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