Write Like Jazz.

Man. I finally found it.

I came across this essay in 2002 for one of my Creative Writing classes. I still wish I could write something like it.

WRITE LIKE JAZZ.

by Brian Tucker

Bim-do-bam-bap.

Man, I write like jazz.

I write like Billie Holiday crying sweet, unhappy love songs and Coltrane on rained-in Friday nights when inspiration is low-man-low, and motivation is rent.

Dig this crazy, splayed finger, tap-tap-typing like Thelonious on ebony and ivory, and hear me scream something like bip-do-bam-bap as a new paragraph reveals itself in the form of cool.

It's not in the broken-down line breaks or half-hearted metaphors that my thinking takes shape. It's in the unheard rhythm of an author stuck somewhere in the unholy limbo-middleness of black, white and unread all over.

Bim-do-bam-bap.

Do you feel that acoustic jibber-jabber splashing out of the verb choices and similes left understated and overdone? Can you feel the pulsing percussion of a long-winded, hyphen-crazy, thesaurus-referring-to, goateed and fedora-capped, 20-something? If you can, that is if you can dig it, let me know.

I am the jam session - improv and ad-lib. No sentence is sacred except for the end and even then, I'll probably just undo and delete it.

Man, I backspace more than Bird after a bad trip at the Vanguard. Under my careful supervision, Word-doc becomes Nina SImone, wailing in some utterly provocative, mezzo-soprano, "Save me, somebody save me." I don't disappoint - save, save as, backup to floppy disk. Bip-do-bam-bap.

Lead sentences are like trumpets, in the fore and in position to turn page-scanners into readers [and maybe even fans]. Adjectives, like nimble-fingered drummers, keep the all-important ... pace. Direct and indirect objects take, take, take - the groupies of this literary juke joint. And those smoke-filled metaphors make the reader's mind expand like Gillespie checks. Now, that's cool.

I write like jazz. The next big thing, just about ready to blow, almost got read over the weekend, consider pending rewrite - that's me. What a wonderful world it is when the manager pays for the coverage, when the agent returns your phone call, when the professor can't find the right starting point for all the would-be-scribbling, when you flesh out the first tow chapters over caffeine and Danish.

Cue the emcee.

I can't remember where or when it happened - when my writing became jazz, became so much more than just words on a page, became music to my ears. I did miss that Saturday dance, so it could have happened then. But only a fool would speculate over such specifics, such particulars, especially when the conception is not so important as the reception.

Have I been received well?

***

Reading it now, I realize how little I know of writing, of music, of jazz, and what it meant to me at the time when I truly loved this piece. I've memorized the whole of it almost, from reading it so often. Around that time, I always had some jazz music playing, while I worked on my laptop all night until morning (as I do now), but at the time, I was writing, for my classes, my major subjects, my minor subjects, and the cigarettes I smoked and the coffee I drank were all quickly cleaned up by Len-Len. Trusty Len-Len, I wonder where she is now.

Coltrane.