You know, creativity is a strange and wonderful thing. It refuses to be put in a box, at least for me.

I've always been a writer. That's what I tell people who meet me and see all the books I've published: "How long have I been writing? Well, 13 years professionally ... but I've 'been a writer' all my life."

But back in the day, I also used to draw a lot. Both of my parents are painters -- not the kind who paint houses, but the kind who make and sell art to hang on walls. Both of my kids are highly artistic. You could say it's in the family blood.

(Except for my wife. Robin would tell you she doesn't have a creative bone in her body ... but I disagree, because she constantly has to find creative ways to deal with her house full of weirdoes.)

During COVID, I got interested in music. First it was piano ... and then when I realized I'd have to sit AT A PIANO to play instead of being more portable, I switched to guitar instead.

Maybe you've noticed that the author photo I use most often is of me playing a guitar, taken by my friend Mike Dailey:

After years of learning to love the guitar (I play pretty much every day), my buddy Jake went last year to what he called "guitar camp" in the Catskill Mountains and made me jealous.

This year, then, I thought I might go to this fabled "camp" when the time came. But it wasn't really in the cards. I was super busy, and it was expensive. At least a few grand.

Then, one day as I was getting off a plane, I got a text from Jake. He gave me a web link and said:

So I did. And it's at this point that I should remind you that I'm a huge fan of Austin-based singer-songwriter Bob Schneider. (Not that I'm blowing the reveal I'm about to make or anything.)

When I did as Jake asked, I saw this on the camp's "instructors" page:

Oh, shit. Gauntlet laid.

At that point, I couldn't NOT go. Obviously this was something I'd have to re-mortgage my house to be there for. Fortunately, I didn't need to. I was coming off a big nonfiction Kickstarter and therefore 1) had some money to spend, and 2) was about to collapse from all the work I'd done over the past month or three. A creative break was warranted. Necessary, even.

So I went to guitar camp after all, thinking it would just be fun -- little more than an enjoyable distraction I'd earned after my recent grinding.

But I was wrong.

Now ... to be clear, it WAS fun. It was INSANELY fun. Have you ever stayed up until 4am, singing around a campfire with a shitload of talented musicians? Has said campfire chicanery ever gone on so long that you ran out of normal songs and ended up doing Eminem and Rage Against the Machine?

... but in addition to being fun, "guitar camp" (which actually turned out to be songwriting camp; who knew?) was also an enormous expansion of my creative life and work ... something that looking back, I can't believe I almost didn't do.

Am I going to start writing and performing songs? Write, yes, because Bob laid a gauntlet of his own: We're supposed to write a song every week and hold each other accountable. But perform? Well, who knows. I succumbed to positive peer pressure and did take the open mic twice, but it's not like "performing" is currently in my career plan. I don't need it to be. I'm already a creator in a different discipline, with enough work -- and fulfillment -- on my plate.

But was the camp so, so, SO worth it to expand my mind creatively? Was learning to write songs from four masters (look them up. Some of these folks are practically legends) both valuable and validating to me as a writer of fiction?

Oh yes. Yes, it was all of those things.

A newbie and an expert at the same time

I was the greenest person there in terms of music knowledge, musical ability, performing experience, and all the things that make sense for such an event. BY FAR. Some people had never written lyrics, but were already cover-song performers. Some hadn't performed much in front of others, but had written many songs. I, on the other hand, had done nothing.

I'd never written a song before. Worse, I had NO IDEA how it was done. I literally didn't know where to begin; that's how alien the whole thing was. I'd certainly never played in front of others, nor had the guts to ever try ... until two weeks ago.

So I was the new kid. The outsider. I wasn't a musician by any stretch, and everyone else was. The group was CRAZY talented. It was ridiculous. The open mics sounded like a festival lineup of pros. But it was cool, because it meant I was a person the others could root for. It meant that as long as I didn't get up there and fall down repeatedly while soiling myself, I was exceeding expectations.

But at the same time, I was a strange sort of expert, too. I was immediately astonished -- and remained astonished the whole time -- at how nearly-identical the world of songwriting is to the world of authoring that I already know.

There was a session on finding and obeying your songwriter's voice, and another on getting past your internal censor so that you can create and tell the truth. I learned those lessons years ago. I long ago leaned into "I am who I am, and I make no apologies for it." We were encouraged to free-associate and go with the creative flow -- mysterious as it sometimes is -- but that's a flow I embraced a decade or more in the past. I already knew the joy of the creative fugue ... and how strange and wonderful it is, if you can find it.

I didn't know shit about songs when I arrived. Now, I know only the basics and am trying to improve.

But writing? Baby, I had that in the bag.

Horizontal expansion

Every conversation I had pulled in two opposing directions: I was learning something completely new, yet incredibly familiar.

Songwriters face the same choices that authors face. They can choose to chase algorithms in order to sell their art (Spotify for them, Amazon for us), or they can go in a more "artisan" direction and find their 1000 True Fans instead. Appropriately enough, Bob Schneider (who, again, is a songwriter) was one of my major inspirations when I wrote The Artisan Author. The medium doesn't matter. Art is art, and you can either try to fit what's selling or insist on "doing you" and see what happens.

Since Bob was there -- and because at a ratio of 29 students to 4 instructors, I was able to talk to him a lot -- I actually gave him a copy of the book.

Later, all four of them took the stage. That copy of my book went up there with them.

By the end of the first day, I realized that I wasn't actually learning a new skill. I certainly wasn't doing it just for kicks. Instead, I was learning a logical extension of my current art and passion: writing. Songwriting wasn't separate from what I already did. Instead, it expanded my knowledge horizontally: Not a way to write deeper, but instead just another way to write.

Novels. Novellas. Short stories. Poetry. Songs.

How are they really that different?

Little stories

Tasked with writing and performing a song -- my first ever -- I cheated: I stole elements from my and Sean's book Pretty Killer so I wouldn't have to start from scratch.

Afterward (YES, I did pretty well considering, YES, I got praise from my favorite musician for it, YES, I have video, and NO, you can't see it), it dawned on me: All I'd done was to tell a little story.

Shit. I tell stories all the time.

I need polish with the guitar. I need polish with my voice. I need a LOT of polish with the specific art that is songwriting. But with those things out of the way, I knew how to do this. All I needed was to tell stories in a new way. Stories that rhyme. Stories that, when read aloud, are only 3-4 minutes long.

The song I just submitted to our "Song Club" (the group is TIGHT and staying together) was my first with a stand-alone story behind it: Something that was inspired by the real world, then became a tiny piece of fiction in my fingers ... just like what happens with books.

It went like this:

Last weekend, I went out to sell books at an event here in Austin. A woman came up, gave me a fist bump, and said she was glad to see that people were still reading. She said that she got into it a few years back: “I was locked up,” she said, “and reading got me through it.”
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After this intro, I figured I had a sale on my hands. I asked if she was still into reading … but she said no. She went on, almost helplessly, to explain that out here there was so much else: TV, social media, and a lot more in the way of pointless distractions. It was like she wanted to read, but couldn’t resist the lures of the outside world.
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The next day, I wrote this week’s song. It's called "Started Reading Tolkien" and is about a man who goes to pick his girlfriend up from prison only to learn she's just stabbed another inmate and won't be released after all.

This is the chorus:

Hell. The writing part wasn't alien to me at all. Making it work as a song? That's harder. But I knew how to tell a story.

In the first verse, the guy is told his girl won't be coming out.

In the second, he learns why.

In the third, he decides he'd rather not live outside and dwell on her absence, in the mean old cruel world. So he robs a liquor store to get locked up himself.

I'm not claiming this is a work of genius. I was, however, astonished by how familiar the process was. The characters revealed themselves. The plot progression made sense. The themes appeared as if by magic: The irony of going to prison to be free from the world's madness, and all that.

A game changer

It's far too early to know what the long-term effects of the Steve Poltz Song Factory will have on me, but I'll tell you right now that it's a game changer. Don't expect me to start sending you songs (in fact, don't ask -- I'm not ready to share), but do expect me to have my creative mind blown ... and who knows how it will show up in my work?

Art is art. Writing is writing. We were kin, these song folk and I.

So many new friendships were formed. So much new creative energy was stoked. So many potential partnerships and collaborations were birthed. My "hobby" was validated as a lot more than a hobby. Those four days learning about songwriting held some of the best writing lessons I've ever had. The experience, as a whole, was the single best creative event I've ever been part of.

Bob wasn't at breakfast on the final day (I talked to him last night and he said he hadn't slept much the night before), so hilariously enough I got pictures with everyone but the person I went most to see.

All of these people are A++ . Especially Steve. If you ever get a chance to meet Steve Poltz, take it. He's literally become one of my favorite people in the universe, and is weird as shit in a wonderful way. (He also co-wrote "You Were Meant For Me" with Jewel when they were together. He's the guy in the official video.)

So there you have it: An author's journey into a totally new art that -- as things turned out -- wasn't new at all.

JT