David B. Coe August 23rd 2010

Thoughts on Writing While Listening to Jazz

A few days ago I was listening to one of my favorite jazz albums (Diamond in the Rough by Roy Hargrove) and in particular to a song called “Confidentiality,” and I realized that jazz improvisations are the perfect analogy for explaining multiple point of view transitions for epic fantasy.  No, really.  They are.  And yes, that really is the way my brain works.  So sue me….

“Confidentiality” is an up tempo instrumental piece that begins as most jazz numbers do with a brief statement of the melody line, followed by a series of solos:  sax, trumpet, piano.  There is, at the end, a recapitulation of the melody, and then the piece ends.  Each solo includes echoes of that original melody, but the musicians then range fairly widely into their improvisations, the energy of their playing building to a climax before they hand the number off to the next soloist.  By the time the song is over, the listener has been treated to exciting, virtuosic playing that has enriched and deepened that original melody while remaining true enough to the original beat, tempo and tonal structure that you can always recognize the piece.

So, what does this have to do with writing?  Maybe nothing.  Maybe everything.  When I write multiple point of view novels, I strive to have each point of view character do with the narrative what Roy Hargrove and his fellow musicians did with the melody to “Confidentiality.”  Each character has his or her story to tell, and by splitting up point of view I allow them to tell these stories in pieces.  Each of their stories is different, of course, but each is an element of the larger narrative thread of the novel.  And while I can follow their stories as they develop I always have to keep their threads connected to the larger context.  (Perhaps it’s not surprising that I don’t like atonal, free form jazz.)

I like to have each element of each character’s story have its own narrative arc.  In other words, since I will jump from one character’s POV to the next, switching viewpoints with each new chapter, I like those chapters to have some story structure of their own.  So, like an individual musician’s solo, I want each character’s chapter to begin at one energy level and build to a small peak before I switch to the next character.  I don’t necessarily resolve the tension — actually I rarely do, until we near the end of the book.  But I want those chapters to have an escalating story arc so that by the time my readers reach the end of a chapter, they’re desperate for more information about that character.  I then switch them to a new character, knowing that this may frustrate them to some degree, but knowing as well that they will soon be caught up in the rising tension of the next character’s story.  This allows me to build narrative momentum throughout the book even as I pass the story from one character to another.

Eventually of course, it all resolves, we return to the central themes and tones of the book, and the story ends.

Narrative, point of view, subplot; melody, instrumentation, improvisation.  They are analogous tools, and as a writer I find it enormously helpful to think about other art forms and how they relate back to my own.  I believe I can learn much about writing stories by listening to different musicians from different musical traditions.  Composers of symphonies play with structure, tonality, dynamics, musical tension in ways that can illustrative for those of us who make our living with the written word.  So can modern singer-songwriters who take care in piecing together an album.  (I believe that as we move away from “albums” toward the sale of individual songs, we lose an essential element of music’s storytelling power.  Look at Abbey Road or Blood on the Tracks or just about any album by Pink Floyd.  But that’s a topic for another post.)

Now, just because I find music illustrative for writing that doesn’t mean you will, too.  No problem.  Have you ever looked at Monet’s haystack work or his series of paintings of the facade of the Cathedral at Rouen and considered what the differing perspectives of an artist might tell us about the shifting viewpoints of our characters?  Because that can be pretty interesting, too….

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