Maybe this will be the week that I quote from novelists I’ve never read. (So ashamed to say so.) From the NYTimes book review:
Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music — and mainly from jazz. Next comes melody — which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm. If the way the words fit the rhythm is smooth and beautiful, you can’t ask for anything more. Next is harmony — the internal mental sounds that support the words. Then comes the part I like best: free improvisation. Through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow. Finally comes what may be the most important thing: that high you experience upon completing a work — upon ending your “performance” and feeling you have succeeded in reaching a place that is new and meaningful. And if all goes well, you get to share that sense of elevation with your readers (your audience). That is a marvelous culmination that can be achieved in no other way.
Practically everything I know about writing, then, I learned from music. It may sound paradoxical to say so, but if I had not been so obsessed with music, I might not have become a novelist. Even now, almost 30 years later, I continue to learn a great deal about writing from good music. My style is as deeply influenced by Charlie Parker’s repeated freewheeling riffs, say, as by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elegantly flowing prose. And I still take the quality of continual self-renewal in Miles Davis’s music as a literary model.
One of my all-time favorite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once, when someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: “It can’t be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!”
I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.
I studied a few years of jazz piano when I was in elementary school, before studying classical piano in high school. I still don’t understand either jazz or classical music.
But rock and roll I understand. Hip-hop, too. Those would be my models. Three chords and the truth. Two turntables and a microphone. Etc.
Dude you seriously need to read Murikami’s “Norwegian Wood”. It practically inspired the approach I’m taking for My Life in Records. (The approach being interweaving the themes of a song into a story while barely mentioning the actual song)
Have you ever read “Girlfriend in a Coma” by Douglas Coupland?
No! I haven’t read either of those. I’m really horrible about reading contemporary fiction, especially novels. Lately, I’ve just been reading comics, design, and art books. I need to build my fiction-reading muscles.
I have heard the SONGS Norwegian Wood and Girlfriend in A Coma, though. Hehe.
heh. . . then if you’re interested in reading Douglas Coupland, you should start with “Life After God”. Its very quick to read and it has lots of little doodles in it, so its kinda like a comic book. The pictures remind me of the doodles in various Vonnegut books.
i’ll check it out!
1. “Life After God” is, indeed, worth reading. I’d also add “Microserfs” to this, but after those I kinda figured I grasped Coupland’s worldview and probably didn’t need to go further into it unless a friend grabbed me by the shoulders and told me I had to. (Still waiting for that to happen, though Grant’s comment above is suggestive . . .)
2. Murakami is a long-term wanna-read for me, too. Why not let’s avoid the collective guilt and go halves on a stack on Murakami paperbacks once you get to town, then we can take turns reading them?
Oh, and if you want my advice, don’t be ashamed of what you haven’t read. I’ve never read, for starters, David Copperfield, Crime and Punishment, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Jane Eyre, Invisible Man, On the Road, Beloved, or any novel written by Ian McEwen, Iris Murdoch, Mario Vargas Llosa, or Anthony Trollope. Start feeling guilty about any of these, and there’s just an ocean of guilt waiting for you for all the others you’ve never read. You’ll get to the ones you’re meant to get to.
TW –
Let’s definitely go halves on a stack of murakami!
As for the guilt…my theory is that a book makes it’s way to your consciousness at the right time: for instance, i’ve been wanting to read THE DESIGN OF EVERYDAY THINGS for a year or two, but last night I finally started reading it, and it blew my mind! It was like I was MEANT to read it last night.
I like being mystical about my reading habits…
– A