When he was twenty-eight years old and rocketing to the peak of his
fame as a jazz saxophonist, Theodore "Sonny" Rollins decided to take a
break. "I felt I needed to brush up
on various aspects of my craft. I felt I was getting too much, too soon,
so I said, wait a minute, I'm going to do it my way. I wasn't going to
let people push me out there, so I could fall down. I wanted to get
myself together, on my own." For three years he didn't record or play
publicly. For three years he just practiced.
At first he practiced at home, but out of consideration for a neighbor
with a baby, he decided to lug his axe instead to the nearest public
space and practice there. So was created one of the great romantic
images of American music: a lone genius playing to the night on the
Williamsburg Bridge.
When Rollins returned to performing, his work was not as dramatically
different as his followers either hoped or dreaded it would be. For a
while in live performances he teamed up with some of the architects of
the new "free jazz" sound and ventured a ways into new territory, but in
the studio he stayed pretty steadily on the hard-bop road that he
already knew. He went deeper, though. He made it more his own. He pushed
the edges, and he wouldn't stop pushing them for decades to come.
Now, there are a lot differences between Sonny Rollins and me. For
one, I don't play the saxophone. For two, I'm not a genius. And for
three, I didn't choose my years-long hiatus from my primary work; it just happened to me. (Okay, and I'm not twenty-eight, either. Fine.)
Still, I turn to him often for inspiration and reassurance. Because I
sold a book idea in 2006 that I thought I would finish within two
years, and here I am six years later just pulling together the first polished draft. And there are so many nights when I look back and ask
myself what I lost and what I gained in all that time.
I hasten to say that I haven't been idle. In those years I was hired to
write two screenplays adapting my own earlier work, a web comic and
graphic novel for a lobbying group, and a series of ten kids' books
based on a Japanese comic book. I've created and taught several terms of
a class at the San Francisco Writers' Grotto on "Finding Your Story,"
which is evolving into a book of its own. I reunited with my
collaborator from my salad days, Will Jacobs, to write a series of short
stories that became another series of short stories that became a book
that we'll be bringing out sooner or later. There's been a lot going on
other than professional work, too: my son's years-long health issues,
massive upheavals in my private life, and a transformative journey into
twelve-step recovery (no, not substance addiction—I'll fill you in in
another blog).
Some of those were tasks I honestly had
to do; some of them, I must confess, were just to avoid writing the
book I was supposed to be writing. That book revealed itself, for one
thing, as a far more complex project than I ever anticipated. At one
point I had to throw it all away and reconceive it because someone else
surprised me with a too-similar book. Then the research for the next
conception turned out to be nearly impossible because seemingly no one
thought to preserve the periodicals I planned to write about. Then I
trashed it and reconceived it again, partly because of that research
problem but also because I just came up with a way better idea.
But apart from all that, there were times I just couldn't
write it. The fall-back description of the phenomenon is "writer's
block," but I don't believe it was anything so monolithic.
It was, at times, an inarticulable awareness that I didn't yet have the
idea worked out right, and at others an inchoate admission that I hadn't
yet brought my chops up to the point that I could pull it off.
Sometimes, too, it was what Sonny said: I was taking on too much too
soon and I didn't want to let publication schedules push me out there so
I could fail. I had to get myself together on my own. Just that Sonny
caught on to that quickly and made a decision, where I had to rely on my
unconscious—dependably much smarter than my conscious—to drag me there.
In the end, I am here, where I am. The book will be finished, then it
will be edited, then finished again, then published. It won't be as
powerful, I'm afraid, as The Bridge, Rollins's comeback album. But it will be who I am now, not who I was when I laid down Men of Tomorrow
and cooked up this follow-up idea. It will be me after multiple
reconsiderations of the idea and myself, after herculean (or sisyphean)
parenting labors, after several competing projects and a few alchemical
relationships and twelve tall steps. I don't know if I'll be glad of
those four or five years of unexpected delay, but I know I'll see the
results of them. I'm curious to learn who I am when I come back from my
own long nights on the bridge.
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