Thinking About Music, Stories, and Author’s Voice

As a lover of literature, I am a great fan of the wordsmiths, writers who shape truly elegant prose. It takes a lot to make a novel great, of course. Character is most important, in my opinion, as is the story world. Structure, of course. But lovely writing makes a book sing. The greats, of course—John Steinbeck, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Thomas Wolfe, for example, come to mind immediately. I’m also thinking of authors like Catherynne Valente, Mark Helprin (who I think it’s fair to say gets by mostly on the sheer might of his author’s voice alone—Winter’s Tale is one of my very favorite books ever, it just sings, but it’s sure not because of plot, theme, or character), Alice Hoffman, and, of course, the great Ray Bradbury, my friend, mentor, and one of my book grandparents. That’s just to name a very few off the top of my head.

When I’m talking about elegant prose, I’m talking about passages that make you want to just close the book for a moment and stare at the wall, blinking, while you wonder how in the world did the author even do that?

I don’t believe that author’s voice, the art of elegant writing, is something that can be taught. That’s not to say that I don’t think it can be learned. The best way to do that is, of course, to read. If you want to write beautifully, read anything and everything you can get your hands on. Read at least 1000 pages for every one you intend to write. The second best way is to listen. Listen to conversations, how different people express themselves. Listen to the sounds of the world. Listen to music. I’ve always thought that music, that understanding how music works, teaches you meter and flow—keys to elegant writing. I learned at least as much about writing fiction from high school chorus as I did from college writing classes. After that, it’s just work and practice.

When you listen, you begin to notice how some words just sound pretty, words like wistful or incandescent. You notice how some turns of phrase can be nothing short of magnificent, and the words become thunder. You notice how the length of the lines in a song vary, turning notes into music. Sooner or later, you find that you can work the things you’ve noticed into your writing. And if you keep working at it, you find you can’t help it.

This idea about music influencing writing has been on my mind lately because I recently delivered the final draft of my novel Blackthorne Faire to my publisher. It’s been through the development and copyediting process, and is now with the proofreader. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped thinking about it. It’s a novel that’s literally about music (note the harper on the cover, above), every bit as much as it’s about adventure, mystery, fantasy, mythology, and romance.

While I was tumbling these thoughts about author’s voice and music around in my head, I stumbled across a YouTube video explaining how Pixar uses music to make you cry in their animated films. I highly recommend giving it a look. You can find the original video here:

Alas, the end was muted for copyright reasons, but you can see that part here:

The point that struck me is this: music enhances the emotion in a film in a way the dialog and images alone can’t. As authors of books, we don’t have that tool. We can come close, of course. I know of a few other authors like my pal Zachary Steele who put together playlists to accompany their books. My friend Lou Aronica is actively composing music to accompany the revised and expanded version of his wonderful novel Blue. Lou is himself a songwriter, so naturally there is a musical quality to his writing.

Of course, none of that works on the page the way it works in film. (Well, maybe it can, but that’s a few months off still.)

So the question I’ve been thinking about is this: what tricks of craft and voice can we novelists use instead? How can we do what music does, using only the sleight of hand trickery of words? How can we bring the impact of music to the written page? I’m not talking about adding lyrics, which two of my book grandparents are famous for: J. R. R. Tolkien and John Myers Myers. I’m talking about the deep waves of feeling that the tunes, weaving of melodies and harmonies, can wake.

There are a number of novels that mention music in the story, and so brilliantly, using only the art of words. I remember encountering a scene in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe way back in the second grade. In the scene where Lucy has tea with the faun Mr. Tumnus, he plays music:

Then to cheer himself up he took out from its case on the dresser a strange little flute that looked as if it were made of straw and began to play. And the tune he played made Lucy want to cry and laugh and dance and go to sleep all at the same time.

To this day, I can remember being utterly captivated by that simple passage, and oh, how I longed to hear that tune! I think that’s why Professor Lewis might be the very first of my book grandparents.

J. R. R. Tolkien does something similar near the end of The Return of the King:

And all the host laughed and wept, and in the midst of their merriment and tears the clear voice of the minstrel rose like silver and gold, and all men were hushed. And he sang to them, now in the Elven-tongue, now in the speech of the West, until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.

Professor Tolkien’s writing there is nothing short of magnificent, and the meter of the prose flows almost like poetry or music. If the lines had been broken differently, it might have worked perfectly well as a poem. More, all of the cathartic emotion described is earned utterly through the events of the story that preceded the passage.

Let’s skip forward a few decades, and Patrick Rothfuss publishes another mythopoeic novel, The Name of the Wind. To say that music plays a role in the story is to be guilty of a gross understatement. The lead character, Kvothe, is a musician of remarkable skill. His gift for, and love of, music is probably his single most important defining characteristic. Near the beginning of the story, he is orphaned and lives on the streets of a cruel city, Tarbean. For years, he struggles just to survive, and suffers utterly without his beloved music. The following scene describes what happens when Kvothe finally holds a lute again.

I can honestly say that I was still not really myself. I was only four days away from living on the streets. I was not the same person I had been back in the days of the troupe, but neither was I yet the person you hear about in stories. I had changed because of Tarbean. I had learned many things it would have been easier to live without. But sitting beside the fire, bending over the lute, I felt the hard, unpleasant parts of myself that I had gained in Tarbean crack. Like a clay mold around a now-cool piece of iron they fell away, leaving something clean and hard behind. I sounded the strings, one at a time. When I hit the third it was ever so slightly off and I gave one of the tuning pegs a minute adjustment without thinking.

“Here now, don’t go touching those,” Josn tried to sound casual, “you’ll turn it from true.” But I didn’t really hear him. The singer and all the rest couldn’t have been farther away from me if they’d been at the bottom of the Centhe Sea. I touched the last string and tuned it too, ever so slightly. I made a simple chord and strummed it. It rang soft and true. I moved a finger and the chord went minor in a way that always sounded to me as if the lute were saying sad. moved my hands again and the lute made two chords whispering against each other. Then, without realizing what I was doing, I began to play.

The strings felt strange against my fingers, like reunited friends who have forgotten what they have in common. I played soft and slow, sending notes no farther than the circle of our firelight. Fingers and strings made a careful conversation, as if their dance described the lines of an infatuation.

Then I felt something inside me break and music began to pour out into the quiet. My fingers danced; intricate and quick they spun something gossamer and tremulous into the circle of light our fire had made. The music moved like a spiderweb stirred by a gentle breath, it changed like a leaf twisting as it falls to the ground, and it felt like three years Waterside in Tarbean, with a hollowness inside you and hands that ached from the bitter cold. I don’t know how long I played. It could have been ten minutes or an hour. But my hands weren’t used to the strain. They slipped and the music fell to pieces like a dream on waking.

I looked up to see everyone perfectly motionless, their faces ranging from shock to amazement. Then, as if my gaze had broken some spell, everyone stirred. Roent shifted in his seat. The two mercenaries turned and raised eyebrows at each other. Derrik looked at me as if he had never seen me before. Reta remained frozen, her hand held in front of her mouth. Denna lowered her face into her hands and began to cry in quiet, hopeless sobs. Josn simply stood. His face was stricken and bloodless as if he had been stabbed.

I held out the lute, not knowing whether to thank him or apologize. He took it numbly. After a moment, unable to think of anything to say, I left them sitting by the fire and walked toward the wagons.

It’s interesting to note, I think, that none of these passages actually tell the reader what the music sounds like. The only describe the emotion, the feeling the music inspires, and by doing so, they evoke that emotion simply through the power of the author’s words. And that’s the key, I think. The focus is not so much on the shape and sound of the music, but on the emotion it invokes.

That’s a neat trick, if you can pull it off.

In Blackthorne Faire, music doesn’t just play a key role in the story. In many ways, the story was inspired by music, beginning with the wonderful music I loved so dearly at Renaissance festivals. The mythology of the story was inspired by the poetry of William Butler Yeats, specifically The Stolen Child and The Host of the Air, and by music—the harp tunes of Turlough O’Carolan and the Child Ballads, traditional folk songs from Scotland—the source of much of our knowledge of Celtic myth and folklore. Blackthorne Faire was formed in the womb by music and poetry.

To capture some of that feeling, I tried to match the meter either of one of the Yeats poems or a Child Ballad throughout the book, alternating from one to another section to section, although since I don’t break the lines like a poem, I don’t think anyone will notice, at least not consciously. I do hope, however, that some of the feeling of the music will come through in the prose. It’s in the story’s DNA, as it were.

Beyond that, following the examples of my book grandparents, I tried to focus not on the shape and sounds of the music, but on the emotion it inspires. Here are a couple of examples from Blackthorne Faire:

Jamal led the others back out to the fair. When they reached the main path, Brian came to a stop. A woman playing a harp on a stage nestled in a corner of the crossroads had caught his attention. The others walked on a few steps before they realized Brian wasn’t following them. “You going to stay and listen?” asked Jamal.

Brian didn’t answer. He stood still.

“Apparently so,” Jimmy said, suppressing a grin.

“Then we’ll catch up with you later,” said Jamal. “We’ve gotta hurry. The Rapier Wits are on in a few minutes.”

“We’ll find you,” Jimmy promised.

Brian didn’t notice Jamal and Fiona hurrying away. He listened, and the melody, an old Celtic air, washed over him like gentle rain in a desert. He drank it in like wine, and the strange, unexpected sweetness shook and intoxicated him. The woman pulled notes from the harp’s wire strings, warm and tender, and they reached down deep inside him to wake something, something that had slept, raw and sheltered, for far too long, something that stirred and moved and took wing.

“You like harp music?” Jimmy asked him.

“She’s amazing.”

Jimmy grinned.

The harper was young, younger than Fiona, Brian guessed. And she was lovely. Her hair, long enough to spill down to her waist and into her lap, was the color of fresh, late autumn straw, but shining fingers of light reached through the canopy of trees to turn it to the color of spun gold. Even from a few paces away, Brian saw that her bright eyes were the green of the clear sea near the shoreline. For one single heartbeat, her eyes met his, and Brian felt his heart dance. She smiled, and Brian almost let himself wonder if she had felt it, too, that fleeting moment of connection. Then she looked away.

Another example from later in the book:

Brian and Jimmy stopped where a small crowd had gathered around a performance stage nestled under a tall oak opposite the main entrance to the Half-Moon theatre. The intrusive sounds of the crowd and the festival surrounded them, but Brian didn’t notice. The music of Erin’s harp soothed them all away, a lullaby hushing the noise of the world.

“Brian,” whispered Jimmy, “fortune.”

Brian didn’t answer; he listened, and in the notes and chords he heard more than melody. He heard the sounds of the fair, not as it was, but as Erin knew it. He listened, and the costumes around him seemed no longer puerile or gaudy, but bright and merry, spun from rainbows. Erin played, and Brian heard the music of earth and wood and hidden cities forgotten by time and the march of years, of wild toadstools growing in rings beneath the shadows in the deepest heart of a forest. Shop façades and stage flats vanished like canvas hidden by an artist’s brush, replaced by tall castles and welcoming village squares, alive with people and stories. Brian turned, taking it all in with eyes and mouth wide open. The music shook him, gently, tenderly, like a caress, a touch as soft and full of promise as a first kiss. The tune changed, and Brian heard the sounds of May and the birth of spring, of robins and blue jays, of butterflies and newborns and damp, black earth, pungent and rich. He heard wind and whispers and the buzzing of bumblebees so fat with nectar they could barely flit from flower to blazing flower. He heard the song of streams swelled by melting ice flowing down, down, ever down to join silver rivers leaping over smooth stones.

The music stopped and the crowd’s applause was enthusiastic and appreciative. “My God,” Brian managed at last. “My God, Jimmy, did you hear that?”

“Well of course I heard it. I’m standing right . . . oh.” Jimmy tilted his head as he studied his friend. “No,” he said after a moment. “No, whatever you just heard, I don’t think I heard it.”

I don’t honestly know how well I pulled it off; I am neither a poet nor a composer. More, I don’t really think it’s entirely possible to capture music in prose. I do think it’s possible to remind the reader of music they’ve heard before, and the (so often unexpected) emotions it stirs. Music, after all, inspires connection. It binds us. It’s private emotion shared. I like to think that words can have the same power, that same emotional resonance. Prose driven by the feel and rhythm of music has a new or enhanced power, like adding lyrics to a tune.

In any case, the only tool I have is my own author’s voice—which I owe entirely to all the books I’ve read, the many dear people I’ve shared conversation with, and, of course, all the music I’ve experienced and drank deeply into heart and blood and brain. We are the sum of our experiences and our loves, after all, familiar ingredients spun into something new.

I’d love to know what you think, authors and readers alike.