There’s a discussion on Nicola’s website (scroll down to the last question) about the role of music in her work. I’m curious about how you use music in your writing? Thanks.
Anonymous
I’ve been enjoying that conversation. Music has always been essential to me, but it took that question and Nicola’s response to make me think in more detail about how I feel about music and how I use it in my work.
I’m a verbally-centered person. Language is my primary tool to ground myself, to express myself, to connect with others. That’s part of the writing deal, of course, but it can be limiting. Some things are not so easily expressed in words. Sometimes a person just has to dance, or cry, or throw their arms out and try to hug the world. Music is my conduit to this part of myself.
There are things I’ve learned about myself only through particular pieces of music that have taken hold of me throughout my life. Music is one of the few things in the world that I respond to by wanting to move, to feel, to think, all at the same time, instead of giving preference to thinking as I often do. And it has meaning for me beyond just the words and the beat. Some music has become a part of my self-identity in a way that’s hard to articulate – not just I like this or I get this but I am this: this particular intersection of rhythm and voice and word and sound is about me, for me, of me.
My work so far tends either to use music overtly in this way, or to pretty much ignore it as an emotional force and just treat it as another feature of the environment. Strings is an example of the former, as is my most recent (unpublished) story in which a woman imagines herself a rock star. Those stories are, in one particular way, the most revealing and personal pieces of fiction I have written. In Solitaire, music is background.
It’s hard for me to imagine using music in my work the way Nicola does in hers. We have a fair amount of overlap in our musical tastes, but we experience even the music in very different ways. What a surprise (ironic smile): Nicola and I are different. Different people, different writers. Segue to one of my hot buttons: I get grumpy sometimes at assumptions that my work must automatically always be informed by hers, as if she were the sun and all the rest of us are plants or something. Someone commented online a while ago that since Nicola and I are partners, I had clearly modeled Solitaire on the themes of Slow River. I find this more annoying than I can possibly express.
Please don’t misunderstand me, I am not slamming your question – in fact, I appreciate the careful setting of context (“this discussion on Nicola’s website made me wonder…”) without the actual request to “please compare and contrast yourself to Nicola.” And of course I do compare and contrast myself to her, as she does to me. Maybe I should give her approach to music-in-fiction a whirl just to see how it goes. It’s good to stretch. But I’m not sure that I could assign specific pieces of music to a moment in the story without wanting to go all the way with it and turn it into the sort of experience for the character that it is for me. And that’s not always right for the work.
As I write this, I am listening to what I think of as the early Aerosmith “trilogy”: Get Your Wings, Toys in the Attic, and Rocks. Steven Tyler is wailing about being back in the saddle again. The bass line kicks ass. I am dancing in my chair. Time to go do some work.