Last weekend, my wife, three of our girls, and myself went to the Twin Cities to attend two concerts: Friday night was Metallica and Saturday night was Green Day. We had a blast, to put it mildly. I may deep dive into these concerts at a later time, but I want to touch on two things this week. The first is stamina.
Green Day played, non-stop, for roughly two and a half hours. With very few breaks. And what breaks they did take were a few seconds at max. They kept playing and playing and playing . . . to the point where I became exhausted.
Green Day has an enormous catalog of songs to choose from, and they played many of them. Last year during the Bryan Adams concert, there were so many he played that I forgot that he even sang them. Metallica also has an enormous catalog of songs.
What does this mean for the writer? Simple: keep writing. Ten years ago, I had written five full length novels and maybe a handful of short stories. Now, I have over 60 individual stories, from novels to short stories and even a few flash fiction. I keep going.
The second is what I am calling the genre snob. The last song Green Day played was "Good Riddance (Time of your Life)". After the concert, I overheard someone saying they didn't like the song and that it was outside of their genre--hence the reason they did not like it.
The genre snob isn't limited to musicians. Take Stephen King and John Grisham. King is known for horror, yet some of his better books are the ones that are not horror. Grisham is known for his legal thrillers, and his better books are not in that genre. It's okay to step out of the genre you're in. Even reading the Wikipedia page on the Green Day song "Good Riddance" they note that the song was outside of the other songs.
Yet it is one song they are best known for.
No comments:
Post a Comment