Music and SubStack

‘How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.’-

G.K. Chesterton

I was nine years old when I started taking violin lessons.

Besides my love for words, I have an affinity towards music that makes it inescapable.

Not rock and roll. Not jazz. And definitely not country music where we sing about our last beer, the dog that died and that girl you can’t seem to get over even though she’s forgotten you long ago.

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Not that at all.

I love classical music. Sweeping symphony orchestras. Stringed instruments, woodwinds, Brass and percussion all presenting invisible beauty to the listener and somehow affecting all the senses.

Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, and Tchaikovsky. Let me hear them all. Close friends yet we’ve never met.

Concertos are my personal favorites. They are musical stories- a beginning, a middle, and the end- a three piece perfection to break down the listener’s guard and fill the soul with peace.

At least it does that for me.

But I didn’t think this way when I was 9. I didn’t appreciate it as I do now. Or love it so much.

I only knew that I desired to create music. And the violin was my chosen instrument.

Like writing on SubStack, I didn’t know what I was doing when I started.

The first time I ran the bow over the strings you would have thought it was an injured rabbit rather than a violin.

Scratchy. Off-key. The sound of death coming for you.

But I wasn’t disheartened.

Even at that young age I understood that was the price of entry.

That there are phases to everything and that to begin is to be bad. Then, with persistence you will get better.

Unless you are a career writer, you should look at SubStack the same way.

I have no background in writing. But I decided to write. To learn through trying like I learned to play the violin.

You must be willing to be bad in the beginning. But you don’t have to stay there.

Face the music (pun intended).

Come to terms with the fact that you don’t know how to write headlines that hook. That you don’t know how to write so that your readers don’t get bored and quit reading.

Believe me it’s more challenging than you think. But it’s also simpler than you think at the same time. An odd dichotomy but true in my experience.

Be willing to be bad, learn as fast as you can, and keep pushing yourself forward.

Make persistence your closest friend in your writing journey and take micro-steps daily towards your goals.

If you keep going you will reach the mountain top.

Thank you for reading.