Singing Like Sinatra
To be free as a writer, or anything, is to be allowed to be a cliché
I did it my way!
The cliché over all clichés, because everybody is saying it, and it can’t be “their way” for everybody, can it?
I miss Frank Sinatra. Of course, I never knew him personally, but he was part of the world as I knew it for a very long time, and he occupied a significant amount of space there. When he died, he left an emptiness, never to be filled again.
This is similar to when so many other people have died. You might know, or you may be able to understand when hearing it, that the older you get, the more people you have seen come and go. That leaves life with very many such empty spaces.
What we have left, is what they said. What they were singing. A photo, a video, perhaps.
Even though I was never a devoted fan of Frankieboy, the crooner above them all, I liked listening to him singing. He was singing all the same songs as he had been singing all his life, and people loved it. These repeated phrases, the clichés, were cementing the world’s construction – making Sinatra an anchor point, a cornerstone, a rock to rely on, a guiding star.
We need such elements in life, such stars. Not to keep us in one place or prevent us from moving – no, on the contrary: to help us navigate, thereby help us to move and see more of the world.
Stars are known for their reliability; they are never changing, never inventing anything. They are the definition of clichés themselves, and we all love it. Look up at the sky on a cloud-free night, and you’ll see all the same stars as you’ve always seen there. They cross the sky and are sort of all over the universe, as it seems to you, but they always come back in constellations you know. You’ll always recognize them.
Writers can be like that too. Even the more anonymous ones, who write commercial texts or blog posts on LinkedIn, or similar – those who are not known by name, or only by a few people.
You recognize their writings on the clichés. Not necessarily in the shape of full phrases, not necessarily by starting every text with “I did it my way” or similar, but in such subtleties like their way of circling in on the topic: do they go straight to the point, explaining afterward, or do they start somewhere else, gradually tuning in on the message they want to convey?
Or you may notice their anchor points in the world: how they try to tie anything they write to one or more of the safe, recognizable topics that seem to them to be universally understandable, thereby able to catch the attention and understanding of their audience.
But even though you recognize them on their style, you still want them to invent the world completely in every text. You spot the clichés quickly, point them out as such, and think less of a writer who uses such clichés that have been used more often than others.
You want the writer to do it their way, not realizing that this is exactly what they do by using the clichés. Their way is like everybody else’s way, guided by the stars: the words and phrases that describe the known universe, recognizable, and which we wouldn’t like to be without, as that would leave an emptiness, never to be filled again.
This post was somewhat of a cliché itself, wasn’t it? But, I did it my way.
This article was first published at LinkedIn.
I'm a huge Sinatra fan 😉