The Naming of Things

This is mostly my wife's idea. Although, I've always thought it would be interesting to have a blog. I just didn't think I'd be interesting enough. But if a gazillion other people can be interesting enough for blogs, I don't know why I can't at least try my hand at it.

First and foremost. They make you name a blog before you even start it, which I hardly think is fair. I've written a couple of songs in my life and in the naming of things one of two things happens:

1. The song names itself. My good friend Jacob Champlin does this well. I play lead guitar (which means I play a different guitar than him really) in his band cathy Crescendo. Small c followed by big C. ANYWAY. He often writes songs and then just names them about their main theme. For instance, on his first record, Giant Killers (available with all the rest at cdbaby.com) he has the following songs: The Soldier Song, The Divorce Song, and The Swallow Song. These songs include references to: a soldier, a divorce, and a swallow, or rather, multiple swallows. Now, Jacob and I are good friends and happen to agree on lots of things, but this is one area where we completely disagree. I think it's a lot like poetry: The title of a song can completely enhance the content. I don't always go for this, but I like to use it as a rule of thumb. And of course it will be inevitable, as any musician will tell you, that when people are asking about songs they will not remember whatever well thought out title you have and they will ask for "that little bird song! Can you play that song about the little bird?" So though you have been planning to name that song something like How to Run a Marathon on Tiny Legs or The Art of Winging It Out and though you may really put it down as that on your beautiful record, the fact of the matter is NO ONE WILL CALL IT THAT.

2. I used to play in this sweet rock band called Sequel to Adam and we had a song that I thought was aptly titled As It Stands We're All Murderers. Sweet name, right? Completely. I had written the lyrics and thought long and hard about how to properly name it (this is the second way of naming: thinking long and hard about how to properly name it) and I came up with something that enhanced the original song and sounded bad ass. Except that before it ever got printed onto a record it was titled Come Clean because we needed something to call it in the meantime. So everyone called it Come Clean even though it was not titled that (though we may have announced it as that from the stage).

Point: I've been forced to title this blog before 1) I know what it's about enough to give it a title like The Writing Blog or The Blog as Discipline Blog or 2) it's been around long enough for me to really think long and hard about how to properly name it. And regardless, you'll (if there is a you'll reading this) probably decide what to call it on your own - say, The Luke Hawley Blog or The Stupid Blog.

I suppose I should take a quick moment to explain where I was coming from on this pre-approved title. I just started a graduate program to get a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. It requires me to do a lot of reading (22 novels before Thanksgiving - 6 down, 16 to go!) and a lot of writing (30-45 pages of prose every month). And I have due dates. My normal tendency is to read and write whenever it feels right. For those of you who are strangers to me and are simply stumbling on this blog accidently looking for information on Reading, Writing, and 'Rithmetic, I would call myself first and foremost a songwriter. And the great thing about writing songs is that you're writing something that is going to be approximately three and a half minutes long. I can do that whenever I want, whenever it suits me. Writing for school and, more specifically, writing a novel require far more discipline. So the routine is new to me. I sometimes tell people that I never really committed to anything in my life before I married Sarah three years ago (although my mom says I committed to college, I think that might be a stretch) and it took so much time getting used to that I didn't commit again until we had a baby in April (Eden. I'm sure you will hear more about her.) But I'm 27, I've never had more than an entry level job, always taken the slacker way out, so as to stay cool and relaxed and not care about anything. And I'm kind of tired of that gig, you know? I'm interested in caring a lot about things and treating the things I care about with respect. SO - all this to say - I'm probably going to ramble a lot about Reading, Writing, and Routine. Among other tangential topics.

If you liked the way this blog read, please keep coming back. If you didn't, know that it was my first attempt, but they'll probably all ramble on like this. But I hope you come back to - I have a habit of growing on people. And who knows, maybe I win the lottery and give people $20 for every blog comment they've written. Or maybe not.