Once upon a time in my wild(ish) youth, I loved music so much that I wanted to be it—that's really the only way I can describe it. I wanted to breathe it, wear it, live it. So I taught myself to play guitar, because making music seemed as close as I was ever going to get to becoming one with it, so to speak. My ultimate goal was to grow up to be Bono or at the very least Natalie Merchant, and wear fringed and waifish things things and and twirl rhapsodically around the stage, guitar in my arms, while long-haired boys played instruments around me and gazed rapturously at me from the audience.

I approached learning to play guitar the way I approach most things—by diving right into the middle and hoping I would never need to swim back to shore (so to speak) to learn all that tedious beginning stuff: You know—music theory. The names of chords. Stuff like that. I learned the names of the strings; I watched my brother play, and saw how he made shapes over the fretboard with his fingers to make chords-diagonals, triangles, a sort of rectangle (those would be bar chords) and I copied him. I knew how to play piano a bit, so I at least understood some music basics, like scales.

That was enough, I decided. I was off: I starting writing songs. And I don't think I'd ever felt quite so powerful—imagine, music was spilling out of me (well...sort of). And they weren't half bad, those very first songs. They were a little odd, granted. And short. In a burst of enthusiasm, wrote a lot of very short songs. And of course I eventually needed to swim back to shore for things like the whole concept behind bar chords, which I learned from my friend Dave's drunk uncle, who was sleeping off a bender in Dave's garage while Dave and I were out there with our guitars stumbling over a song by The Jam. ("Billy Hunt, Billy Hunt, Billy Billy Billy!" Man. Great song.) Dave didn't know the names of chords, either. Clearly neither of us was long on patience. His uncle rolled off a garage shelf, startling us (we hadn't noticed he was out there), grabbed Dave's guitar from him, and snarled, "It's like this, ye idjits. Like a scale. F follows E, F# follows F..." His hands traveled up the guitar fretboard, demonstrating. Then he handed the guitar back to Dave, climbed back up on the shelf and went back to sleep.

Boy. Talk about an epiphany. I played in bands for years after that, but it was perhaps the most useful thing anyone has ever taught me about guitar.

So that was a milestone in my career as a guitar player. But another one, an earlier one, and very important one, was learning to play without watching my fingers, because that's when you're finally free to express the music, to interpret it, rather than just play it. And there comes a point when playing is so automatic that looking down at your fingers while you play can completely throw you off, will cause you to lose your place in a song. Your fingers know the song; they don't need to be watched.

I was just pondering these things, because I was mulling the vast vocabulary, the jargon, used to describe the process of writing, which is in some ways (to me) similar to the vocabulary of music theory. I never knew any of it until after I'd sold my first book, THE RUNAWAY DUKE and as a consequence met other authors who were fluent in this language. I didn't know what "H&H" meant; I didn't know what a "dark moment" was; I didn't know what an "arc" was. None of that stuff. I just...wrote the book. The characters suggested the story; the story shaped the characters; the characters, as they solidified and grew, in turn further propelled the story. I imagine, like musicians, that some authors feel more comfortable arming themselves with theory before they embark on writing; others throw themselves in; others find a middle ground. I remember a guy I knew in college who was a theory genius-I could splay my fingers in any imaginable way over the fretboard of a guitar, and he could name the chord ("C minor suspended fourth inverted etc. etc."— but he never once wrote a song. I, in fact, can barely recall seeing him play guitar. I think he thought he needed to know every rule there was before he could allow himself the pleasures of playing.

Some musicians use theory to help them craft masterpieces; others are like Mark Knopfler from Dire Straits, who says, "I've always rebelled against theory. Guitar playing for me is a compulsive activity. I'm not against learning technique, however, and I'm certainly not against acquiring new knowledge. I don't have any favorite keys that I play in. To me, different keys have different colors, different qualities, so I like playing in lots of them."

I guess I'm kind of like Mark Knopfler as a writer. :) As I wrote more books, I acquired writing jargon cautiously and judiciously, and I'm still deciding how and if it serves me as a writer. Some of it has helped (mostly when it comes to communicating with other authors), but I still go at storytelling rather instinctively—uncovering a story like an archaeologist down on her knees at a dig, a piece at a time, not necessarily knowing where an uncovered piece fits into the whole yet, but generally knowing that it will fit, and not necessarily uncovering pieces of it in any linear fashion. And of course it's awfully useful to know what an "arc" is, etc., but for me it might be best not to, metaphorically speaking, watch my fingers too much as I write, because too much examination might just throw me right out of the story, the way watching your fingers can throw you out of a song. Mostly I trust that once I get rolling, my fingers will (usually) know the story.