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Murder, he wrote

3 min read

“So, how do you like retirement?” a friend asked this week.

“It’s great!” I said.

“What do you do besides play music?” he continued.

“I write a column for a newspaper.”

“They pay you to do that?” he asked, incredulously.

His reaction didn’t surprise me. For most of my life, I’ve been paid to do two things that many people think don’t qualify as work: playing bass guitar and writing.

“Lucky duck!” people exclaimed when I was 16. “That ain’t work!”

“Well,” I’d explain, “I may be on stage only from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., three nights a week, but that isn’t the whole story. Factor in time spent practicing and driving to and from gigs and setting up and tearing down, and it’s actually more like 40 hours.”

“Baloney!” they’d grouse. “It still ain’t like working in a steel mill.”

I soon gave up trying to explain that work is work, no matter what you do. Like any job, being a musician has its pitfalls. True, as a modern-day troubadour I didn’t have to worry about having my head lopped off by a mercurial monarch. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that sometimes – when the fifth set loomed and the members of the band outnumbered the crowd – I saw the English degree I never earned sitting at the bar, mocking me. Now, after 50-plus years, no one looks askance when I say I’m a musician.

Instead, they marvel that anyone would pay me – or anyone – to write. Because writing is easy. Ask anyone who isn’t a writer.

Writing is an inexact science. There is nothing more depressing than staring at a blank computer screen at deadline – although staring at a TV screen with a crawler reading “President Donald Trump today …” comes close. To a writer, that unblinking monitor is the Eye of Sauron.

Sixty-eight years ago, long before computer screens, someone asked sports writer Red Smith if turning out a daily column was a chore. “Why, no!” he replied. “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins and bleed.” Not much has changed.

I know what you’re thinking. “It still ain’t like working in a steel mill.”

Never having labored in a mill, I can’t verify that assumption. But I will admit, while writing, I’ve yet to have a lump of molten steel burn though my dungarees.

Still, writing can be challenging.

To speed the process, author Mark Laidlaw came up with a pretty good idea, posting on Twitter, “The first line of almost any story can be improved by making sure the second line is, ‘And then the murders began.'”

See for yourself: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And then the murders began.”

Still needs a good ending, though.

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