They're Reading My Song
I know a lot of writers are also musicians and I think there's a lot of symmetry in the ability to express your own thoughts and emotions through both mediums. I just wish I were one of them. My own musical background is spotty at best and while I hope I have at least developed a quasi-educated ear, I have never spared the time to translate that to truly interpreting my thoughts through the actual playing of an insturment. One day, perhaps. Of course, I've heard that one before.
Anyway, it's always struck me how you can play a sequence of notes or chords on a piano or keyboard exactly the way they're played in a favorite song and that's all they sound like: a lifeless series of sounds. And yet, you play the song just one time and there's actual life and movement in them there notes. The song itself gives life to the notes, which leads me to believe the brain is doing its thing and taking the context of the songs, the wholeness, and providing you with the powerful experience of actual music. Not individual sounds but an organic, lively work to be experienced.
So of course I wonder if words out of context work the same way as those notes. I think they must. I don't think writing is inherently difficult to do. I think millions of people can write gorgeous, eloquent sentences or phrases. But I think many less can do the same in a paragraph length piece, and still fewer for something even a whole page or longer. It's not the act of writing that's difficult, it's the act of producing a work through your writing that translates into a moving and positive experience for a reader. Anyone can plunk out notes on a piano but how many can create an entire song, opera, symphony? Or play inspired jazz, drawing the music up from learned musical knowledge and inborn instinct? And I mean the Miles Davis kind, not the Kenny G stuff, whatever that is.
I'm not a good rewriter so to all those writers who say the same thing, thank you for saying it in places I've been able to hear it. It counters the folks who claim that writing is really re-writing. I've tried but I just can't do it; once the piece has been written, it's over, like water gone downstream. I just can't get it back.
What I can do is go back over the material and find the passages that just don't work. They don't read write and I often wonder how they made it onto the paper. I can either revise them, rework them, or even throw them out, although sometimes I just have to flag them and do it later after some more distance has been achieved. But I go through the work, word by word, line by line, and make sure that the cadence works, that the sentences lilt the way they're supposed to, that the rhythm is readable and catching.
When I describe the process like that, which is accurate for me, it reads like I'm describing how I think of music. It makes me wonder if psychologists or whoever it is that studies brain functions has compared the chemistry going on inside someone who's listening to good music with someone who's reading a good book. Two very different types of experience, I grant you, but my guess is that there are some overlapping things going on upstairs. Providing anything's happening up there at all. Which may not be a given, depending on what you're listening to or what you're reading.
So self-editing for me is concerned mostly with things like sentence structure, word choice, pacing, and the flow of the story. Sadly, I can only do it through a limited number of iterations because of the over-familiarity that kills the creative energy for the "finished" work. I did read somewhere, though, that Stevie Wonder sets an end date for his album projects and no matter how he feels about it, he lets it go then. Otherwise he'd keep tinkering with it for ever. Who was it who said that a work is never finished, merely abandoned?
Music to my ears.
Anyway, it's always struck me how you can play a sequence of notes or chords on a piano or keyboard exactly the way they're played in a favorite song and that's all they sound like: a lifeless series of sounds. And yet, you play the song just one time and there's actual life and movement in them there notes. The song itself gives life to the notes, which leads me to believe the brain is doing its thing and taking the context of the songs, the wholeness, and providing you with the powerful experience of actual music. Not individual sounds but an organic, lively work to be experienced.
So of course I wonder if words out of context work the same way as those notes. I think they must. I don't think writing is inherently difficult to do. I think millions of people can write gorgeous, eloquent sentences or phrases. But I think many less can do the same in a paragraph length piece, and still fewer for something even a whole page or longer. It's not the act of writing that's difficult, it's the act of producing a work through your writing that translates into a moving and positive experience for a reader. Anyone can plunk out notes on a piano but how many can create an entire song, opera, symphony? Or play inspired jazz, drawing the music up from learned musical knowledge and inborn instinct? And I mean the Miles Davis kind, not the Kenny G stuff, whatever that is.
I'm not a good rewriter so to all those writers who say the same thing, thank you for saying it in places I've been able to hear it. It counters the folks who claim that writing is really re-writing. I've tried but I just can't do it; once the piece has been written, it's over, like water gone downstream. I just can't get it back.
What I can do is go back over the material and find the passages that just don't work. They don't read write and I often wonder how they made it onto the paper. I can either revise them, rework them, or even throw them out, although sometimes I just have to flag them and do it later after some more distance has been achieved. But I go through the work, word by word, line by line, and make sure that the cadence works, that the sentences lilt the way they're supposed to, that the rhythm is readable and catching.
When I describe the process like that, which is accurate for me, it reads like I'm describing how I think of music. It makes me wonder if psychologists or whoever it is that studies brain functions has compared the chemistry going on inside someone who's listening to good music with someone who's reading a good book. Two very different types of experience, I grant you, but my guess is that there are some overlapping things going on upstairs. Providing anything's happening up there at all. Which may not be a given, depending on what you're listening to or what you're reading.
So self-editing for me is concerned mostly with things like sentence structure, word choice, pacing, and the flow of the story. Sadly, I can only do it through a limited number of iterations because of the over-familiarity that kills the creative energy for the "finished" work. I did read somewhere, though, that Stevie Wonder sets an end date for his album projects and no matter how he feels about it, he lets it go then. Otherwise he'd keep tinkering with it for ever. Who was it who said that a work is never finished, merely abandoned?
Music to my ears.
posted by Rick Ollerman at 10:50 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home