Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 2: How to Write a Perfect Sentence
7 Plays10 months ago
A great sentence expresses ideas clearly and concisely, leaving audiences eager keep reading. But as a writer, how do you go from a spark of a thought to a tight, well-constructed sentence?
Join Adrian and Ian as they dissect some of their favorite lines from literature—as well as a few sentences they wrote themselves.
Hosted by Adrian Pio and Ian Sutherland
Produced by Tiffany Carlson
Edited by Connor Ferguson
Music by Coma-Media, via Pixabay
© 2024 Libretto. All rights reserved.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Focus
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome to Well Put, a podcast about communications for mission-driven organizations from libretto. I'm a senior creative lead, Adrian Pio. Hi, I am Ian Sutherland. I'm a creative lead at libretto. And today, Adrian and I are going to pick a sentence that we've written that we're proud of and break down how we came up with it and why we like
Impactful Sentences and Opening Lines
00:00:34
Speaker
it. And along the way, we'll discuss some of our favorite sentences and literature as well to give you a little bit more backstory on our own process.
00:00:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think sentences obviously are the building blocks of narrative text. A lot of times it's the starting point and can be the hardest place to start is that first sentence you put down on the page. And so I thought maybe an interesting place for us to begin today would be to talk a little bit about some of our favorite first sentences, in this case from literature, just those are the ones that folks tend to be most familiar with. Do you have, Ian, a favorite first sentence from a book you've read?
00:01:10
Speaker
I certainly do, and I was thinking of you as I was preparing for this conversation because we've spoken about this book before, 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of my favorite books ever, a fantastic chronicle of one family in the fictional town of Macondo. And the opening sentence, I remember reading it many years ago, I think in 2020, 2021,
00:01:35
Speaker
And it just hit me like a ton of bricks. And I'll read it out loud here. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Orliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. I remember reading this at the beach. I was on a family vacation. In August, we had all gone down to the Jersey Shore, as we always do. And it was a hot, hot day. And I had my feet in hot, hot sand.
00:02:03
Speaker
And reading that line, first of all, what a strange opening. He's in front of the firing squad and he's thinking about discovering ice. What does that even mean?
00:02:15
Speaker
But I love that, just the fact that he's talking about this ice cold substance, ice, obviously on this hot day. It flooded me with curiosity. What's going on here? Why is this man in front of a firing squad? It also had a really unique treatment of time. The sentence kind of looks towards the future and invokes the past simultaneously. So I immediately, I immediately jumped at this sentence.
00:02:40
Speaker
Yeah, it's an exceptional choice. I can understand how it resonated with you being at the beach, probably Anita Vice yourself. No, it's a beautiful, beautiful sentence. And the word that really resonates with me in particular is the word discover, because that sort of means so many different things. Like, was he not familiar with ice before? Was it like the secret ice that they had just uncovered in a secret location? It really does ask so many questions.
00:03:04
Speaker
in just a beautiful and succinct way. And as you say, the way that Marquez plays with time is always remarkable. Many years later, he would think back, construction is just so evocative.
00:03:18
Speaker
Well, I'm excited to hear from you what your opening sentence that you picked from literature is because, as you know, I think very highly of you as a writer. I think you're the king of succinct opening phrases that really hook a reader. It's certainly hooked me many times since we started working together. What did you pick, Adrian?
00:03:37
Speaker
Well, I guess in that case, you'll be very pleased to know that the sentence I chose is quite short. I chose the first sentence from Zora Neale Hurston's, Their Eyes Were Watching God, which reads as follows, ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
Crafting Concise and Memorable Sentences
00:03:57
Speaker
I just it's so it's so inspirational to me to think about like so many different ideas captured so quickly there that
00:04:03
Speaker
You're imagining a character looking off at a ship, sort of imagining almost in the way of like a Moana thinking, where is the horizon? Where else can I go? Should I be on that ship? Or conversely, is that ship coming to port to land here? And if so, what goods is it bringing? What stories, what magic, what adventure is contained within that? But the idea of sort of looking off into the distance and imagining possibility
00:04:33
Speaker
and hope and wish and dream, so many different wonderful ideas, words, thoughts evoked by this very simple short phrase.
00:04:43
Speaker
It's a fantastic choice. And you mentioned the brevity component, which I think is really important and I think is fitting because when I think of your writing, I feel like you write similarly, that the opening is always concise. It's a very enticing sort of entrance to what follows. Why is that brevity important to you in your own opinion? You're putting a lot of pressure on me to come up with a good sentence later on in this episode.
00:05:13
Speaker
That's what I do. Why is brevity poor? I think that that goes back to maybe one of our quote unquote libretto mantras, right, which is that simple is hard. I'm reminded of the sort of the Mark Twain, perhaps apocryphal, but the quote from him where I'm sorry, this letter was so long, if I had more time, it would have been shorter.
00:05:30
Speaker
It's really hard to get a big idea down into as few words as possible. And I think at its best, that is what we can or strive to do when we're writing something that's going to be compelling. We want it to be something that's memorable and short and pithy. We don't want people to sort of get lost in the weeds.
00:05:50
Speaker
I'm also reminded of a Bukowski quote, which is that, let me make sure I get this right. A scientist says a simple thing in a hard way. A poet says a hard thing in a simple way. That is sort of the challenge. That's excellent. I was thinking about a quote from the novelist, Japanese novelist, Taruki Murakami, which
00:06:15
Speaker
was a little bit too long to be my choice for a sentence, but I think it sort of relates to what you just said. And it's when you read a good story, you just keep reading. When I write a good story, I just keep writing. And for me, that quote could well as be, when I write a good sentence, I just keep writing. I think that opening that saying a hard thing in a simple way, as you just put it, kind of opens the floodgates for the prose that follows.
00:06:41
Speaker
When you begin writing a piece for our work, whether that's a campaign case statement, whether that's the first line of an institutional messaging platform for a nonprofit organization, do you have any kind of process for how you arrive at that opening sentence?
00:07:00
Speaker
That is a tough question. So much of writing I feel like is a sort of defies systemic approaches, right? Like it's really hard to just sit down and write a beautiful, perfect opening sentence. So I think that for me, the strategy is not to focus on doing that. It's not even like writing advice, but it was sort of a writing experience that I had was watching a New York Times article written live. And it was a story about
00:07:28
Speaker
Google Docs and the author had written their article in Google Docs. And then as part of that, sort of talking about the functionality, the ability to see track changes and go back in time, they then included a video where you could watch live the process of the author writing their story. And so you could see that the first sentence take shape over the course of essentially the entire process of writing, right? He wrote the first sentence,
00:07:54
Speaker
he deleted, he wrote the first sentence again, he deleted, he wrote the first sentence and then the second sentence and the third sentence and then went back and deleted the first sentence. And just the idea that there's so much that happens through the process of writing that it's really sort of a fool's errand to be too focused on getting that first sentence right off the bat.
Writing for Educational Campaigns
00:08:13
Speaker
And in fact, a lot of times the best way to get to your first sentence is to write that first paragraph, then start your second paragraph
00:08:21
Speaker
then delete your first paragraph, sort of start with the second paragraph is almost always a way to really get people into the heart of what you mean. Because you tend to, or at least I do, I tend to sort of write set up prose to sort of get myself going. And then a lot of time that is not really what you need to convey to the audience in the end, you need to get them right to the point.
00:08:43
Speaker
It's such a common issue, especially with a learning writer, somebody who's new to the craft. And I know for me, the first time I ever really wrote professionally was for my campus newspaper back in college.
00:08:56
Speaker
And the first piece of feedback I got, which I think is universal to so many writers, is that I had buried the lead, which is something I think you just talked about. It's a very common issue, both for new writers and old. And I think that's why I really loved your point about it never being too late after you get that second paragraph or even that second line.
00:09:20
Speaker
You can go back and make that first point as incisive as possible. And I have to admit, I still do it. I still bury the lead, uh, often. And I'd like to think that I've gotten better at catching myself before it goes on to another pair of eyes. I don't know if you feel similarly.
00:09:38
Speaker
about that? Do you do find it? Oh, I was just going to say that I agree with you 100% that a lot of times improving is not about removing all of your bad habits. Obviously, you want to do your best to limit them.
00:09:52
Speaker
but it's also sort of becoming aware of them and then counteracting them after the fact. I remember when I first started working at libretto, I would use the word that quite often, the thing that blah, blah, blah. And you just don't need a lot of that sort of filler language and you can go back after. So you can sort of write in your natural cadence and then go back afterward and edit and revise and remove and tweak and bring yourself closer to what feels like
00:10:19
Speaker
perfection to you and slowly those things will become ingrained. So it's not necessarily about like, oh my gosh, I can't kick this habit so much as it is like, I know that I have this habit and I need to pay attention to it and I need to be aware of it. And then slowly over time, you will start to diminish it. All of which to say, you know, I'm, I'm very excited to hear the sentence that you've selected from your own work. I'd love if we could, uh, we've done lots of quoting. Let me hear you quote yourself for once. Absolutely. The line that came to me,
00:10:48
Speaker
from our own work and it was a project that we worked on together. It was not an opening line. It comes in the middle of a case statement, a case for support, a printed piece that you and I had worked on for the Dana Hall School as part of a pretty historic $75 million campaign that they launched in 2023. The sentence is as follows.
00:11:18
Speaker
What does it mean to sail behind those who chart a new course?
00:11:23
Speaker
So for context, that line appeared in the middle of the case statement and it introduced a variety of fearless alumni. And I use that word fearless because the name of the campaign that we developed as the theme was fearless futures for Dana Hall School. And that piece introduced a variety of these fearless women to celebrate their accomplishments and lifelong connection to the school.
00:11:49
Speaker
My hope was that this humble collection of nouns and verbs did the following. Tug at the heartstrings of Dana Hall community members by alluding to a key lyric from the song, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Simon and Garfunkel's song, which was really important because that's what Dana Hall students and alumni sing at graduation and school events.
00:12:07
Speaker
The hope was also that this would encourage readers or likely skim readers to read on by inviting their curiosity through a question. Having a sentence framed as a question like this is always a nice way to entice further interest and then inspire those readers to give to the campaign, which is always our hope and always our goal.
00:12:27
Speaker
I think it's a really beautiful statement. I think it does a really good job of connecting the alumni with the current students, but also thinking about whose footsteps those alumni were following in as well. It is sort of a continuum. It builds a really strong community message. We're all walking in somebody else's footsteps. We're all sailing behind.
00:12:46
Speaker
someone else who has charted a pathway. What does that pathway look like? What trails have they blazed? And who led the way for them? What does it mean that we're all part of this continuum together? Well, I appreciate that, Adrian. I would say I learned from the best and you're certainly one of them. What sentence did you pick from your previous work that you chose to highlight today? You're far too kind, as always, and you have to stop building me up. It's what I do.
00:13:16
Speaker
Yeah, maybe I took the assignment a little too literally. I was looking at sort of opening sentences and I was reminded of a line that was sort of the opening spread of the view book that we worked on for a manual college.
00:13:30
Speaker
And I think this was 2016. Emmanuel hired us to sort of revisit their full admission suite and to do sort of institutional branding, think a little bit about what they stood for and how they could differentiate themselves or a small Catholic institution in Boston, liberal arts focused. And they were looking for ways to sort of stand out a little bit in the crowd. So obviously incredibly educationally dense marketplace there.
00:13:57
Speaker
When we had done our discovery work and sort of came to the conclusion that one thing they could improve on was emphasizing the sense of adventure and looking for students who want to really dive in and take advantage of the opportunities available to them. The students who had succeeded at a manual were the students who participate in athletics, who went to student groups, who showed up at the events, who were really engaged in the community and who felt like this was a place where they belonged and where they could thrive.
00:14:27
Speaker
And so as part of that, we developed a sort of institutional sort of admissions campaign based around the idea of going all in, making the most of your experience. And the view book, which said go all in on the cover and the inside, the first spread, and this is the sentence I was thinking of, said, no one ever tells the story of the time they chose not to go on an adventure.
00:14:52
Speaker
And this, I actually remember exactly where this came from. I guess it was with a good friend of mine. And we were, this must have been sometime in the late summer, early fall, we were driving through the North Shore, can't remember why. And we drove past a corn maze. And I remember we turned around and we went back to go to the corn maze.
00:15:18
Speaker
was not part of our plan and we checked the weather and we're like it is about to rain and we said you know we're gonna go anyway we went through the corn maze and of course five minutes later we were as one tends to be irretrievably lost and per prediction the skies opened up and it
00:15:40
Speaker
horde. I mean it was raining so very hard and we're trapped in the middle of this field and there's like lightning or like this isn't safe we should not be here and so of course now we're like sprinting like trying to break through the walls of the maze like looking at our phone to try to figure out where we might be based on the picture of the maze and we do finally you know it was it wasn't very long probably five minutes we did find our way you know out
00:16:04
Speaker
back to the parking lot and of course at the time that we make it to the parking lot the rain stops and it's you know it's one of those little micro bursts that just flew through and we're absolutely drenched and there's another two or three cars that have just pulled up with you know the
00:16:19
Speaker
of dads and kids who are gonna go do the corn maze. And I'm like, what are these two guys doing? Soaked outside of the corn maze. And I thought to myself, well, you know what? No, you never tell the story of the time that you don't get soaked in the corn maze. You don't tell the story of the time that everything goes perfect. The best stories are from those moments where you take a risk, you take a chance, you choose the adventurous thing. And I've always thought that idea.
00:16:45
Speaker
No, truly, in many ways it reminds me of something my mom likes to say that I'm sure she did not coin. But it is essentially you always regret what you didn't do the most. That's a perfect example of that.
00:17:01
Speaker
I'm going to stretch a little bit and say that story, which is a wonderful inspiration for that line, for the Emmanuel View Book, reminds me of another quote that you've told me before and that I've stolen with glee and used often without attributing my knowledge of said quote to you. So I've chosen this moment to apologize for doing that. I'm coming clean, so to speak. I believe it is a Ray Bradbury quote, and it
00:17:29
Speaker
goes something like this, and forgive me, I'm paraphrasing a little bit as it's from memory, but sometimes you have to jump off a cliff and build your wings on the way down.
Enhancing Storytelling through Personal Experiences
00:17:39
Speaker
And I think that speaks to, in many ways, building a sentence. It's never really from scratch. As you mentioned, there's a personal dimension to how you came up with that line. There's also a lot of context from, I'm sure, the discovery conversations you had leading up to that deliverable being completed that you can pick and pull inspiration from, whether it's something a student said
00:18:06
Speaker
or a very high ranking administration leader said there was something that made its way into that opening piece.
00:18:15
Speaker
I wanted to tell you, and I'm glad that I did, it's an enormous relief for my conscience that I probably used that a dozen times. I assume the royalty checks are in the mail. Yes, they're on their way. Yeah, I love that bribery quote. I feel like I've become a little fond of aphorisms. I'm far too young for this, but I have one more quote for you on the subject of what you were just talking about, which is the Carl Sagan.
00:18:40
Speaker
to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. You can't do anything truly from scratch, as always, context. Truly. Well, to ask you a question about that, how often do you find yourself at work for the pieces that we produce and that we create here at libretto? How often do you find yourself
00:19:02
Speaker
drifting to a personal experience to tell the story of an organization or of a profile of somebody. Does that happen often?
00:19:12
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the earliest pieces of writing advice that most people hear and, you know, take it or leave it and certainly you should stretch it, but is to write what you know. And I think you do have to start with something that you have some familiarity with. Obviously, a big part of writing is going out and reading and learning and getting to know more things so that you can
00:19:35
Speaker
increase your sort of repertoire what you can write about knowledgeably. So you should never feel constrained to only write based on things that have happened to you. But I do think that it's a great starting point to leverage the things that you know intimately and the things that you've experienced in your
00:19:50
Speaker
your everyday life because those tend to be things that are universally true for others as well if it happened to you I'm sure it's happened to other people in similar ways and of course every experience is unique and that's what makes it lovely and interesting but it's those points of connection the shared experience also that allow us to invite others into those stories or to make our stories meaningful in in their lives as well. As a follow-up to that do you ever experience
00:20:18
Speaker
a block when trying to write that opening line because as we mentioned previously that is usually the most challenging part is having that first true sentence and if so if you do experience that block do you have any sort of process to get out of it?
00:20:31
Speaker
Oh, I talk about that constantly. I like to call it the paralysis of the blank page, which is that moment when there's nothing there and you don't know where to go and you know sort of generally what you need to do, but you don't know how to do it or how to get there. And a lot of times you'll sort of look at something you've written after the fact and be like, wow.
00:20:50
Speaker
I did not know that I was going to write that thing that I just wrote, or I had no idea that metaphor was going to come out, or I didn't know that direction was something that was going to work here, and it did. It's impossible to predict those things ahead of time. I think that there are probably some amazingly talented savants out there who can just write a paragraph in their head and then type it out.
00:21:11
Speaker
I'm not one of them I am amazed when I see that type of thing. I think you have to just sit down and you have to break the blank page right you have to put something down, you have to get started, and then afterwards you can sort of figure out where you were headed or.
00:21:27
Speaker
or where you even needed to begin. But you can't focus too hard on getting it right the first
Finding Inspiration and Overcoming Writer's Block
00:21:32
Speaker
time. That's a challenge that you'll never overcome, I think. That's how you end up paralyzed. I don't know. What is your experience? How do you tend to start when you're in those moments?
00:21:43
Speaker
I often go to music. I think the music is not always necessarily relevant to the work we do. We work with a lot of scientific organizations, research institutions, etc. I think the craft of songwriting has a lot of parallels for writing, especially when it comes to a memorable opening line. One of my favorite memoirs of all time is by Keith Richards, who is the
00:22:13
Speaker
guitarist of the Rolling Stones and also an accomplished songwriter behind a lot of their hits. I take a lot of inspiration from him because he was always the hook guy. So he described his writing process as hearing something that somebody would shout across the room. For example, you can't always get what you want. And having that stick in his head until he had a riff or some piece of music to accompany it.
00:22:39
Speaker
And then he would hand it off to his writing partner, Mick Jagger, to fill in the rest of the song, to fill in the verses. But he would just have that opening line, so to speak, that chorus piece. And I try and think of writing, when I'm locked in a similar way, what's going to stick in somebody's brain? What's something, some phrase or some statement that will make somebody pause and go,
00:23:10
Speaker
that's interesting and then continue on. And the nice part of that is you know when you don't have it. I think you can kind of sense when you do have it, and I want to ask you a follow-up question about that, but I think you always know when you don't have that line. So it's sort of an easier process to climb that mountain and to get to that place as a result.
00:23:36
Speaker
But yeah, I would say looking for that, again, using that phrase sticky, what's sticky, what sticks in the brain, that helps me navigate towards the opening line. But that brings up another point which I just referenced is how do you know it's the right opening line? We have a really interesting and effective editorial process at libretto where we work together and collaborate and make changes to each other's writing all the time.
00:24:03
Speaker
And I'm curious, Adrian, if there's been instances where you thought you had a dynamite opening line only to discover, you know what? It's not quite the tone. It's not quite the feel. It doesn't quite work.
00:24:14
Speaker
Oh my gosh, there are so many times where my darlings have been put out to pasture, I'm afraid. But that is the writing way. I think that you can't have too much pride of ownership. Certainly if you're writing in your personal life or if you're planning to publish an individual work under your own name, you have more leeway there.
The Role of Collaboration in Writing
00:24:35
Speaker
Although I do think editing is extremely important and no one should ever be entirely isolated when they're writing something. I think it's always important.
00:24:44
Speaker
to get another opinion, to listen to the folks who you trust for criticism. But definitely in a professional setting, the work that we do, I think it's vital to have other people who can gut check you, who can provide inspiration when you feel like you don't know the direction, but also who can provide maybe a voice of reason when you think you have the right direction, but are maybe a little bit off course.
00:25:11
Speaker
There are plenty of occasions where we've started with an interesting or good line, but only reached a great line. Thanks to the collaborative process of somebody else saying, you know, I'm not sure about that word or
00:25:27
Speaker
I like where you're going with it, but the tone isn't quite right for this piece that we're working on or the client that we're working with. How can we tweak this to make it slightly better, slightly more appropriate? And so I would say that it can only be achieved collaboratively in this type of setting. It's an interesting concept to talk about. It's vital. It's crucial. I don't think good writing exists without strong editorial support. But it's also deeply personal to have your work chopped up.
00:25:56
Speaker
happens to all of us, but how did you have any sensitivities earlier on or were you pretty much appreciative of the fact that this is the process and this is how, as you said, great lines come to fruition through collaboration? I like to think I'm pretty mature about it now, I'm sure.
00:26:14
Speaker
In younger days, there were times where I was upset to lose a line or an idea or a concept. But, you know, it's not really worth tying your ego up to a sentence. I don't know. I mean, all the sentences we've talked about so far today are sentences I love and think are wonderful. But if somebody told me that they didn't like them or if we get a comment on this podcast that says these sentences you chose were bad, I mean,
00:26:38
Speaker
That's totally fine. I think that people have their opinions around those types of things, and you just can't allow that to define who you are professionally or personally. You can't take those things too personally, I don't
Key Elements of Compelling Writing
00:26:51
Speaker
think. All of which to say. So let's talk a little bit about what we've covered so far. So what are some of the key ideas that make for a good and compelling sentence in the context that we've described, both within novels, but also especially within our professional work? I think
00:27:07
Speaker
One idea that you talked about a moment ago that I'd love to deposit as our first key idea is that it needs to be something that is memorable or as you put it something that's sticky, something that's going to resonate with folks and cause them to think about it a little bit or want to learn more or feel like, I hadn't thought of that before in quite that way.
00:27:27
Speaker
that really sort of tugs at that curiosity part of your brain that gets it stuck in there. And I think for me a solid takeaway was something you said right at the beginning, which was about brevity. An opening sentence should be incisive, it should ignite curiosity in the reader, and if possible it should be fairly to the point, fairly brief. I think that's very important in a marketplace that we are in, where we're competing for
00:27:52
Speaker
attention and hoping to inspire in some cases donors and I think that's just a very crucial point to look for when crafting that opening line.
00:28:02
Speaker
Perhaps a third takeaway is that it should be appropriate. As you were just saying, you want to know what you're attempting to do with any particular piece of writing. So if you're trying to inspire curiosity and get people to go to a website to learn more than you want your sentence to lead folks in that direction. As you were just describing, you're writing something that's within a campaign case statement and you're trying to raise money. You want your sentence, your general ideas to lead people towards
00:28:31
Speaker
whether that's a sense of loyalty, a sense of inspiration, a sense of gratitude or pride, that will get them to take the action that you're thinking of around making a donation. So in many cases, that's where it is time to kill your darlings if you write a really good sentence, but it's not in service of the piece. Those are occasions where you might need to revisit to ensure that you're targeting what you're actually attempting to achieve.
Hosts' Personal Interests
00:29:09
Speaker
talking with you about this, Adrian. I've just got one more question. And that's, what are you loving these days? What are you listening to? What are you reading? What are you watching? What have I been loving? We have actually just started watching The Wire. I know that my wife and I, I know that we are extremely late to the game. This was everybody's favorite show 15 years ago. But living in Baltimore, as we have been over the last year, it felt like it was finally time.
00:29:36
Speaker
to get around to watching the wire. I know there are many people who said, oh, you're living in Baltimore. You've got to watch the wire. And then there were probably about just as many people who said, oh, you're living in Baltimore. I would definitely wait to watch the wire and don't watch that while you're there. But I will say it has been a lot of fun to see areas that we know on TV and to see folks talk about stuff that's, you know, all of a sudden very near and real to us. I do
00:30:03
Speaker
have to be quite clear that my lived experience has almost nothing to do with the experience of folks in the wire. I think that the city, even in the past 20 years, has experienced a lot of change and a lot of it for the better. I know that there are certain areas represented, there are certain experiences represented there that I hope are becoming much less common as people get support made. But I do think that as a
00:30:31
Speaker
a piece of storytelling, it's extremely compelling. I love that it's not afraid to be complex. It's not afraid to get into the deep internal politics of a police department.
00:30:41
Speaker
the type of stuff that I think the law and orders and the NCIS's just are not willing to deal with because they're afraid that they're going to either confuse or bore their audiences. I think the wire is willing to go there in a way that makes it feel really true and authentic and interesting. And I've just, I've been having a great time with it. Looking forward to season two.
00:31:03
Speaker
That's great. I'm a huge fan of David Simon, the showrunner, even though I haven't actually seen The Wire. I've seen another of his miniseries, which was based here in New York, where I am. And I agree with your ego, Steve, for sure. Let me turn that question around. Do you have anything amazing happening for you? What do you love in these days?
00:31:22
Speaker
Mine is a slightly weird choice, but I'm going to say the bass guitar. I'm a amateur musician and I was brought up on the six string guitar. But in Alaska, quick pause, quick pause. This is my turn to gas you up a little bit. Amateur musician is far, far too modest and extremely talented, multi-instrumentalist. Go on, sir. That's very kind. That's very kind. Thank you.
00:31:52
Speaker
I love music. That's why I play and I really love playing music with others. And I think the bass guitar has allowed me to do that in a way I'm not as interested in the guitar. I'm a little bit more solo and introspective, I suppose, on the sixth string. But just this past weekend, I had this lovely opportunity to play bass with a band I work with.
00:32:15
Speaker
at a 50th birthday party in Connecticut. We jumped in a van, drove up, played a bunch of Grateful Dead covers along with some original material. And just going to bed that night, I was thinking to myself, what a treat, you know, that four strings and a rhythm section can take you from meeting a stranger in a bar, which is how I met the frontman of my band, to a grassy,
00:32:42
Speaker
lawn in Connecticut playing for a bunch of friends and family of this person I don't even know. It's just a wonderful thing. And so I think I've reignited my love for the bass this past week. Not that I never was in any danger of fading.
00:32:59
Speaker
Um, so that would be my, um, slightly existential, what I'm loving, uh, this four strings, 20 friends and incredible talent. Well, thank you. Thank you very much. Make it all happen. Now that's amazing. I'm sorry that I wasn't able to attend that birthday party, but that person you don't know didn't invite me. There was a private, a private event, but I'll have words with them.
00:33:21
Speaker
offline to see about next year for the 51st. That's exceptional. Well, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you, Adrian, for this lively conversation. This has been... The feeling is mutual. I certainly hope so. This has been Well Put, a libretto podcast. I'm Ian Sutherland. And I'm Adrian Pio. If you want to learn more about libretto and what we do, you can check us out at libretto-inc.com. Well put.