“Eugene’s Trick Bag”
I’m musing a bit as the end of the semester dawns on the horizon, so I hope you’ll bear with me. I was thinking this morning about “Eugene’s Trick Bag”, the guitar piece played by the character Eugene during the cutting contest at the end of the 1986 movie Crossroads. Eugene is a trained classical guitarist aspiring to play the blues, but he draws on his whole repertoire when he needs it most.
There’s a lesson in that for writers.
Now I have to admit, this isn’t something that occurred to me out of the blue while thinking about that movie, but a thought I had about the movie because of the final project for one of my classes. The class is a study of short forms in writing, focusing on flash fiction, prose poetry and brief nonfiction works, taught by Bruce Holland Rogers. The final project for this class comes in two flavors: 1) I could write five original pieces of publishable quality, or 2) I could compile a master document of tricks and techniques I’ve learned from the pieces we’ve studied during the semester.
I love to write, and an excuse to write five new pieces appeals to me. However, I am compiling the tips and tricks instead, because I think every writer can benefit from having a document like that to draw on when we feel stuck, or want to add a new angle to a piece that isn’t quite working. Sometimes the entries can even inspire a new piece, just by flipping through them.
After all, like Eugene, sometimes in the course of my writing career I may feel that my back is against the wall as I try to finish a piece, and I want to be able to dig into that trick bag for just the right move.
—–
Submissions Update: since I last posted, I have submitted pieces to Strange Horizons, Spirituality and Health, Sport Literate, and The North American Review.