FIRST THINGS FIRST
It’s only work if you’d rather be doing something else
What shall I write about?
Every week, I ask myself that question, and the answer determines how hard I have to work. And when I find something I care about or that I truly wish to share, writing can be a pleasure.
That’s this week’s topic, and I want to write about it because the importance of early choices applies to other jobs as well, and to chores we have to do around our houses or farms. I had that thought the other day while talking with my partner’s heavy-metal drummer son who has just released a cover version of a well-known pop song.
The music behind Ava Max’s ‘Sweet but Psycho’ sounds like many other middle-of-theroad hits… well, at least to me, and when I first heard it, I thought the accent might have been on ‘Sweet.’ But then I listened to the words again and watched the Youtube video.
Chris Turner’s take, on the other hand, is an aggressive screamer-metal version, complete with mad drumming that focuses on, ‘Psycho,’ so it feels different, but appropriate. And from what I could hear, the original was screaming out for a cover.
When I said that to Chris, he told me something similar to what I said about writing words at the beginning of this column. “The most important thing...,” he said, “...is to find the right song to cover. Something that suits your style that you can change and improve for your listeners. If you can do that, rearranging the music can feel easy because it makes sense.”
It also makes sense for the experience of writing music to be similar to that of writing words, but the point I’d like to stress is that choices we make at the beginning of many jobs can affect how difficult they are and how we feel while doing them. And as long as we have a say in the matter, the first choice often has to do with timing.
For example, when my kids were growing up in Francistown, I used to go to sleep for a few hours and then get up to write for The Voice at 2am because I found it easier to concentrate while the house was quiet. And when I had gardening or other physical work to do outside, I could get stuck in while the sun was still low in the sky.
In England, meanwhile, I try to time my gardening chores around the rains. That requires being flexible enough to do jobs on short notice. But when the soil isn’t too muddy and hasn’t gone solid yet, chores like pulling weeds and planting crops can be enjoyable activities… partly because it takes less effort to do them well.
The trick, of course, is to get as much of my writing as possible done while it’s raining, so I will be free to enjoy the things I do outdoors when the conditions are right. That means my choice of topics doesn’t just affect the columns. Good ones improve the rest of my life as well.