Discovering What I'm Writing About (And Why It Matters)

The easiest and truest answer to why I'm not making more progress might involve the words talent and/or discipline. But I'm going to suggest that I'm being hampered by being unclear about what I'm actually writing about.

I don't think it's a chronological rendering of Salvador Dalí’s life story, and there's only so much I can do to recreate his visual artwork in music. The substance of what I can explore is in the dynamics of Dalí’s relationships with people like his wife Gala and fellow student and early friend, the poet Federico García Lorca.

What is it about this story that only I can write? I'm not a painter, nor am I from Spain, so what affords me the authority or permission to consider this man and his legacy?

This week I may have discovered the answer. A scene in a TV show I watched and then another in a book I read both focused on the fracturing of the relationship between a father and son. Both of these hit me like a gut punch because being a dad is a crucial element of my identity.

I lovingly hold an ongoing tension in my life as the father of a young man who will soon turn 26. Did I do a good job bringing him up? Have I been there for him enough in the past and in the ways that matter in the present? How much of my own shit have I unconsciously passed on? Is our relationship resilient enough to survive differences of beliefs or opinions, and if I lost my life for any reason, have I said and done enough for him to truly know how important he was to me?

Dalí was disinherited after a notorious falling out with his father. For an artist already wrestling with internal demons, the shift was seismic: he went from a doted-upon child prodigy to a young man who lost his mother at sixteen and was cast out by his father at twenty-five.

This week I'm looking at the story through Dalí's lens as someone who pushed his father away and then found himself 'orphaned' before he'd developed the maturity and capacity to fend for himself.

The bigger theme I'm noticing in Dalí's story and reflected across the world right now is how men wound each other across generations, and how that wounding shapes everything they create.

Once seen, how does this influence the story and message I want to tell through the work I'm writing? And how does it inform how I show up in the world outside of my work?