I’m pretty convinced that when it comes to Hamilton, the Broadway play, there are two types of people: Fans who are obsessed with the show, and people who haven’t listened to it yet.
I feel I should teach a Hamilton appreciation class - “Intro to the Ten Dollar Founding Father without a Father..” I am not a fan of rap, I’m ignorant of Hip-Hop — and yet I love this musical.
The first time I heard the first song, I had to pause it every few seconds, as I couldn’t believe its intricate lines. It was like seeing the first colour movie, after watching a lifetime of films in black and white. It wasn’t so much, “How did he write that?”, as much as, “How is it possible that something so perfectly written wasn’t written before?” As a wanna-be author, aspiring wordsmith, and not-yet-successful writer, I instantly understood Hamilton the man from that first song, from the verses that talked about his writing:
The Ten dollar, founding father without a father
got a lot farther by working a lot harder
by being a lot smarter by being a self-starter
by fourteen, they placed him in charge of a trading charter….
Inside he was longing for something to be a part of
the brother was ready to beg steal borrow or barter
Then a hurricane came and devastation rained
our man saw his future drip-dripping down the drain
put a pencil to his temple connected it to his brain
and he wrote his first refrain a testament to his pain
Well the word got around they said this kid is insane man
took up a collection just to send him to the mainland
Get your education don't forget from whence you came. And the world is gonna know your name.
What's ya name, man?
Say it with me… Alexander Hamilton… My name is Alexander Hamilton. And there's a million things I haven't done. But just you wait, just you, wait.
I was exhausted just listening to that opening. One minute twenty seconds, and you already know everything about the man’s drive, ambition, passion. In just 80 seconds, the storytelling on display, the sheer force of rhymes and brevity of language… these words will be sung a hundred years now, five hundred. They’re timeless. Why did they resonate with me?
A voice saying Alex, you gotta fend for yourself
He started retreatin' and readin' every treatise on the shelf
I wrote my first story when I was four, dictated to my grandmother on her blue typewriter. It was a diversionary tactic on her part: I would play with the typewriter keys, tapping on them like a piano until they all stuck together in a tangled mess. She, a former teacher, didn’t scold me or put it out of reach: she reasoned I was wanting to create something on the page. “Tell me a story, and I’ll type it,” she said. I dictacted a short story, of friends from school coming to my house for a playdate. Kurt Vonnegut it wasn’t.
But that magic trick of envisioning words, saying them aloud and having them transcribed and solidified onto paper, never left me. In grades five and six, I wrote stories in little notebooks my father brought home from work; in grade seven, I graduated to looseleaf paper in red duotangs; in grade nine, I used a computer. Story after story came; some finished, some not. I did not lack for ambition.
University came, and writing for fun was replaced by essays and research. Sometimes, schoolwork could still be fun: I enjoyed writing essays for Film Studies, and Psych. Didn’t often enjoy the essays in English Literature. After my University degree, I knew I wanted to make TV shows, so off I went to study TV Broadcasting in college. Scripts, outlines, news stories: writing was suddenly fun again. After college, I went from a reearcher on a two week assignment to the Associate Producer, Director, and Writer of a show for Discovery Channel. I finally saw the magic words, broadcast to 82,000 people on premiere night: Written by John Holt.
And now, where I am? Six blog entries in 5 years.
Why do you write like you're running out of time?
Write day and night like you're running out of time?
Every day you fight, like you're running out of time
- Non-Stop, Hamilton
To be fair, I am technically still writing at work: scripts, proposals. Videos I’ve written and voiced and produced have been retweeted by the Prime Minister, and seen by hundreds of thousands. I’m playing a role, if a minor one, in protecting people during a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. But I gotta say, I miss those little notebooks and red duotangs, where it was just me and my imagination.
Why do you write like it's going out of style?
Write day and night like it's going out of style?
Every day you fight like it's going out of style
Hamilton, the man, was a prolific writer: He wrote 51 of the 85 essays of The Federalist Papers, which are still consulted today. But it’s the writer/composer/star of the musical, Lin Manuel Miranda, who makes me ask: what should I be doing, non-stop? He paints Hamilton not just a man who writes, but as a man who must write: he’s compelled to do it. It saves him from an earlier inglorious death; it will later drive him to his own self-destruction.
There would've been nothin' left to do
For someone less astute
He would've been dead and destitute
Without a cent of restitution
Started workin', clerkin' for his late mother's landlord
Tradin' sugar cane and rum and other things he can't afford
Scannin' for every book he can get his hands on
Plannin' for the future, see him now as he stands on
The bow of a ship headed for a new land…
I have a friend, a colleague off on sick leave, and they are writing a blog post every day. I admire that discipline, and I’m inspired by it.. With 4 kids, a busy job, and certain other impediments, I can’t commit to something as ambitous as that. But I can commit to doing better than before.
There is no perfect time to write. There’s only now.
- Barbara Kingsolver