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Bob Dylan’s fame was getting to be a big hassle. Wherever he went, mobs of people would come at him. A new music star in the New York City scene, he could hardly get into his car without young women throwing themselves at him.
Sounds great, fame, in a way. But he didn’t see it that way.
“People wish they had written the songs I have written,” he said.
Rings true. In all of us, I believe there’s a desire to become famous, stand, and sign in front of throngs of people being drawn in and mesmerized by songs we made.
Dylan’s quote turned out to be a lasting memory from the new movie about his rise to fame from 1961 to 1965 coming from an obscure town in Minnesota with nothing more than his guitar and lyrics and hopes to get discovered.
Titled “A Complete Unknown,” the movie reminds us of the clever, honest, and powerful lyrics penned for so many of his famous songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Like a Rolling Stone.”
The actor who plays him, 29-year-old Timothee Chalamet, deserves an award for his acting and singing in this movie. I recommend you go see it.
But I’m not here to write a review of the quality of the movie but rather focus on Dylan as a writer and then expound on that with other insights from a professional writer on this topic, then sprinkle in some additional thoughts of my own.
I haven’t studied Dylan but I take it from others that he wrote some of the best-ever song lyrics. How one does this I don’t know when you consider the thousands of people, probably more, who have written words to songs they hope will make them famous. But it seems to me Dylan’s willingness to take on serious and sad topics, bad interpersonal relationships, and awful things about life, made him stand out. The poetic rhyming also helps his words sing and dance like Michael Jackson once did. The interesting phrasing reminds me of the poets I studied in college English classes.
The raw emotional unleashing is what I noticed about Dylan’s songs. He doesn’t hold back how he feels. If someone finds what he sings offensive, it’s clear that’s not his concern. He wants to say what’s on his mind however angry or agitated and frustrated he may be, and so be it. People listening to him in the movie stopped and stared at him as he sang these dreary stories of how bad life is. They couldn’t turn away; he was being too real and that’s not often achieved. Many try; most come off as insincere. Not Dylan – he really believes what he sings. Or is great at selling authenticity?
This all ties in with the lessons I’ve learned this past year from Rick Rubin, a music producer who wrote a book called The Creative Act that changed my approach to writing. You can’t worry about what people will think. They have to come last. Just write what is real to you regardless of anything. No outside distractions are allowed. Let loose. Be free. Embrace total honesty. Since I read this book and now listening to Dylan’s lyrics in the movie, I’ve noticed a correlation between being truthful and producing powerful writing. Only write what I like; all else is out of my control.
So here’s some truth: I think I’m getting better at writing and have come a long way from when I lacked any kind of writing skill. I am no longer concerned with whether you like this or not; my only concern is making sure I like it.
Related to all this, I stumbled upon a book I checked out from the library over two years ago but had misplaced it in my car. I found it over the holidays – feels like serendipity or some kind of fortunate twist of fate. Read it all in one day because the topic fascinates me. Written by Roger Rosenblatt and titled Unless It Moves the Human Heart, the book summarizes in elegant, super-digestible prose the author’s experiences teaching a writing class to adult students at the State University of New York several years ago. There are plenty of gems I wanted to share such as this:
“When a writer wonders ‘will it sell?’ he is lost, not because he is looking to make an extra buck or two, but rather because, by dint of asking the question in the first place, he has oriented himself towards the experiences of others.”
Writers can’t know what others want. They can only write what they think and feel and disregard everything else. How a writer sees whatever is the end of the matter. Full stop. But the writer has to figure out what he or she believes.
“For your writing to be great – I mean great, not clever, or even brilliant, or most misleading of all, beautiful – it must be useful to the world. And for that to happen you have to form an opinion of the world.”
My opinion is that the world isn’t waiting for me to write anything, has no idea what it would like for me to write, and doesn’t care if I write another word. I feel the same way about other writers. Whether they write anything else doesn’t matter as far as I’m concerned. But if they write something insightful and truthful that makes me understand my life better in new and profound ways that can lead to more personal fulfillment, I very well might want to read that. It all depends. It’s all unknown. It’s all risk and attempts to figure something out and whether I do or some other writer does is just what we do and it may never mean anything to anyone else.
In this book, the author touches on an issue I have read many times about what’s required to become a good writer. You have to read and read and read some more. It makes sense for a writer to exercise the brain by experiencing and analyzing how other writers produce their sentences. The author of this book, however, doesn’t believe in doing a whole lot of reading if you want your writing to have more of an impact. Never before have I read this advice.
“As a writer, your ignorance is immensely useful to you. With it, you find your own way. If you read too much, you won’t trust your ignorance. You’ll learn everything that is known and nothing that is unknown.”
How liberating and reassuring I find this. As a kid, I didn’t read much and have regretted that because I figured this had weakened my potential as a writer. I often think of how much time I spent practicing basketball when I could have been reading and how much better my writing would have been had I read all those hours instead of playing hoops which, right now, seems like it was a waste of time. Becoming better at basketball has never helped me write better.
But maybe it’s not such a bad thing to have not read much when younger. Who knows? It gives me hope because I’m not the most well-reader and never will be. Given a choice these days, I write rather than read because time’s running out on my life. How much longer my brain will work is an increasingly pertinent question.
Being fair to myself, my reading habits picked up in college and for the past thirty years so I’ve read plenty. I think the real reason my writing isn’t better is I’ve been too concerned about what others think of my writing when, in fact, they hardly think about it at all. It’s been time not well spent.
Personal hang-ups aside,
it’s hard for me to overstate how much I enjoyed reading this book, which is a high compliment to the writer. It seemed as if the entire narrative was produced for me. He wrote:
“If you have something worthwhile to say, and you just say it, plainly and clearly, your reader will add in his or her life, and feel it personally. Your reader will think that it was you who gave him the depth of feeling that’s unearthed. But all you did was hint at it. It was he who dredged up the great heartbreak, delirium, or outrage at injustice. You merely created the sparking words.”
Which feels like the right time to return to Bob Dylan’s writing. I don’t really know what his songs are about. As I listened to them last night, I thought mostly about the guy singing from his heart, being so vulnerable and stubborn about letting out whatever he was feeling through song lyrics. I don’t know what he was feeling when he wrote the songs and sang them, but I know what I felt: scared, worried, inspired, understood, afraid, down, fired up, confused, desperate, stimulated, and pretty good. I felt there was another person on Earth, Bob Dylan, who felt pain and expressed it in a way no one else has. I can’t pin down exactly why he made me feel all this. I am only sure that this is what happened inside my mind and heart.
All writers can do is share how they feel.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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