The Worth of a Writer



We writers can make this mistake - valuing our writing in how many pages we finish. Beat this...

"Barn burnt down, now I can see the moon."
- Masahide

Or this tiny story from a conversation with the Japanese lady who sat next to me at Lynn Harrell's concert on Saturday (he is a great cellist and my teacher's teacher)...

"My one daugher played the violin and the other played the cello, the best was my son on the violin. But my son became too busy for the violin when he went into medical engineering. He told me that he felt his identity was gone. He had time to build a Model T Ford from scratch, but the violin takes a different kind of effort."

Harrell talked about Shubert before his last encore that night...

"When he was one of the pallbearers at Beethoven's funeral, little did Shubert know that he would only have a year to reign over classical music. He died the next year at only 31. In that year, he wrote great music, but if he only wrote this one little piece, it would have been enough..."

Don't number words, my friend.