Since the work of God's Spirit in an individual is life itself, that peculiar activity (as essential as it is) can hardly be called a "tool." Therefore, I'd like to propose another activity that I'm now calling my number one "tool" in my writer's belt.
Over the last year or more I've read numerous books and articles concerning the writing process, replete with ideas for activities, exercises—tips and tricks— to effectively engage the creative soul in the process of creating. A few have actually been useful. But I have not yet read of the one I stumbled upon that has so changed my approach to writing. Of course, this technique may leave you cold, and may do nothing for you, but if even one person can benefit from my sharing it, wonderful!
The technique relies on the use of significant, meaningful music. At its core, it's pretty simple.
My own aesthetic tastes in music are diverse and I am always looking for something new and different that I'd not ventured into previously. As it happened, about the time I started writing my first novel, I stumbled upon a composer/artist that I'd never heard of, and working in a genre I'd never considered as worth my attention. But I decided to purchase an album of his that was highly recommended by other listeners.
At first hearing I was blown away by what the music was all about. The more I listened to it, the more depth came forth from it. After weeks of listening to it on a pretty regular basis during my commute to and from work, I began to notice something. The depths of emotional expression in the music somehow paralleled the emotions being expressed in my novel. As time went on, the writing and the listening became more entangled, more interdependent, and more potent.
Although I rarely listened directly to the album while I wrote, I began to "hear" the music (in my mind) as something of a sound-track to my story as it unfolded, as the words flowed out onto the page. And as I physically listened to the music in my vehicle as I drove to work, new parts of the story would come to mind, with the music again being something of a sound-track. Of course, I bought four more albums of the artist's music to broaden and deepen my sound-track's repertoire.
Now that my novel is mostly finished, the music has become an intimate part of my memories of writing the work. And just as remembering scenes from our favorite movies are nearly always accompanied by auditory memories of the movie's score, I hear "my music" playing when I read passages of my book that I wrote months ago.
I have now begun the work of embarking upon writing a new novel. And as part of my exploratory research for the story, I have already started searching for what will become this book's sound-track. I found my first piece of it last week, and it has already excited me more about the process.
I need to mention here that the music I select generally has nothing to do with the actual subject of the book—neither in time period, nor location. My first book, about a woman growing up in rural north Georgia in the mid-nineteenth century, has been musically accompanied by Astor Piazzolla (an Argentine of Italian extraction, growing up in Brooklyn NY) playing his mid-twentieth century "Tango Nuevo" compositions, which are classical and jazz-like rhapsodies of the musical feelings and foundations of tango music (definitely not your grandfather's tango). It's not that I'm trying to imitate what these characters may have heard in the way of music actually available to them, but more that I am looking to activate and amplify my own emotional response to the story, and in the process, enhance the emotions they express on the page.
For my next novel, based in first-century-AD Nabataea (the land of incense, spice and silk caravans in the desert just east of the Jordan River) I have, so far, come up with a nineteenth century Russian opera (Prince Igor) by Alexander Borodin. Some of this music is very dramatically informing my emotional response to the story now unfolding. Go figure.
All the music I have used so far in this process (and I expect to keep to this principal) has been instrumental (yes, opera is loaded with singing, but I'll explain about that!). The reason for instrumental works being most suitable is that I find with any overt songs (with discernable lyrics) the words being expressed tend to clutter up and get in the way of my own words. I am the one trying to write—I don't need Johhny Cash, Paul McCartney, Barbara Streisand (or you pick the singer) getting their words into my pea-brain and gumming up the works!
Pure, instrumental music is a powerful and abstract force for unleashing emotional processes in the soul. I previously mentioned the opera music I am now immersing myself in and, of course, opera is song. But the pieces I have chosen are not only powerfully orchestrated, but are sung by choruses (not individuals)—in Russian (which is, to me, a totally indecipherable language!). The chorus becomes simply another instrument in the orchestra, and in this case, an incredibly human and emotional one.
My best understanding of how to choose effective music for this purpose is three-fold. The music needs to be richly endowed with:
—BEAUTY
—EMOTIONAL DEPTH
—COMPLEXITY
It clearly needs to be beautiful. This is the foundation of music's appeal to our aesthetic senses. If it is beautiful, it will capture our attention. Just as we desire our writing to be beautiful—for the beauty of its language to captivate the reader—we need the same characteristic present in the music we will use to encourage our writing.
And the music should not simply be frivolous, or catchy (unless those are the principal, and superficial, aims of our writing), but it should ooze with emotional content. The more powerful the emotions in the music—the heights of sublimity, the depths of sorrow, the chaos of fear—the deeper will be the feelings stirred up in our language, and so in our writing.
And finally, the music must have a level of complexity that defies unlocking its full potential in a single hearing. Every time the piece is played, deeper layers, more subtle nuances must come forth. You may need to live with this music for the months it might take to compose your novel, and you don't want your sound-track to become pat or stale. In the case of the Tango Nuevo music mentioned above, I have listened to many of the pieces dozens of times—maybe more than a hundred times for a couple of them. You want to become intimately familiar with the music, but you should never tire of it.
You know you are getting to the heart of the music when you know it so well, you begin to get inside the head and the heart of the composer and performers. You begin to feel, perhaps, what they felt as they expressed it, or at least you begin to feel what they truly wanted you to feel as you hear it. Even laying aside using this music as a tool for informing and enhancing your writing, becoming this intimate with a meaningful piece of music is a worthy pursuit in itself. I highly recommend it.
It may be a difficult job tracking down just the right music for this purpose, but hey, that's why God gave us Amazon and iTunes, isn't it?
I hope my "secret ingredient" that I've outlined here will be useful to you, and as Forrest Gump said—"That's all I have to say about that."
Enjoy the process, and keep on writing!
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>>> Unless otherwise attributed, all text and images are Copyright, Bill Brockmeier, 2017. All rights reserved.
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