Chapter 3

                 This is an excerpt from “A Place Called WriterL: Where the Conversation Was Always About Literary Journalism,” copyright 2022 Mr. Write Coach LLC.

Writers have long mulled the relationship between their craft and music, none more eloquently than E.B. White in the final chapter of “Elements of Style.” “Here is where we leave solid ground,” White writes.  “Who can confidently say what ignites a certain combination of words, causing them to explode in the mind? Who knows why certain notes in music are capable of stirring the listener deeply, though the same notes slightly rearranged are impotent.  These are high mysteries ….”

The mystery of connection between writing and music intrigued WriterL members after a post by veteran journalist Peter Kendall in September 1999. The discussion lasted for several days as hosts Jon and Lynn Franklin, musician and Poynter Institute writing guru Roy Peter Clark, music journalist Brett Campbell,  journalist/trumpeter Steve Provizer, writer/flautist/artist Karla Harby, authors Don Obe and David Hayes and journalist/educator Terrie Claflin and others joined in.

Peter Kendall: There’s a play called “Cowgirls.” It’s about a trio of classical musicians who find themselves mistakenly booked into a country western venue in Kansas. The pivotal scene is the one where the owner of the venue, an experienced country singer, explains what’s wrong with the singing style of the classical musicians – they sing all the notes. I’m no country music fan, but as they learn to let go of the wrong notes and lay into the right ones, the emotion that emerges is a revelation. Picking the right details is the same thing as picking the right notes. Sometimes, when the story needs to be advanced, country singers will simply say the lyrics just as good writers will get through the momentum-building aspects of the story to the critical details that need to be emphasized.

Please tell me there are analogies that can be drawn from other musical forms.

Steve Provizer: The phenomenon you describe has been at work in the jazz world for a long time (I play trumpet).

When you’re a young musician starting out and you want to establish yourself in the self-selecting world of jazz, you show off your chops with pyrotechnical and muscular playing. At the very least, this proves you’re serious about mastering the craft.

Then, as time goes by, partly because of having proven your bonafides, partly because of flagging energy, partly, possibly, because of increasing wisdom, you play fewer notes. In about 80 years of jazz, I can think of no counter-example to this progression.

The common wisdom which is applied in this situation is that the musician has become a better story-teller; that his or her playing is more in service of the music (or the listener) and less in service of his or her own ego needs.

While there is an obvious analogy here with writing, it should also be noted that it is indeed difficult to improvise at a fast tempo; it’s not very much more difficult to write more words. One final wrinkle: The difficulty of playing fast means that the improviser is much more likely to resort to learned cliches rather than invent something new.

Jon Franklin: Peter Kendall asked for parallels between music and writing, and I think there are a very, very many.  Rhythm is the beat.  Pacing is how lines build into verses.  There are harmonies and melodies.  There are refrains, as with Tom Wolfe’s blue bolts to the feet.  There are major and minor keys, and they are quite different … as in a love story and a ghost story, respectively.  There are movements, and you will see them in well done serial narratives.  There are crescendos.  A good long piece may well have symphonic qualities.

I tumbled to this in mid-career, and have been ungodly busy since then capitalizing on such things.  Too busy, to my frequent chagrin, to undertake any formal study of music.  If I had it all over to do again, I’d definitely (a) learn to read music and (b) study music history.

As it is, I studied art and art history, which also comes in very useful. There are many parallels between what a painter/sculptor does and what a writer does, except that the parallels seem to me to be most useful in terms of the artist’s vision, the painter’s eye.  Music relates more to the performance, it seems to me.

I will go so far to say that, in the last 15 years or so, I hear my pieces musically.  I do, that is to say, when they are strong pieces and working well. I hope, I truly do, that there’s someone on the list who has a good classical music background and can pick up this thread and lead us somewhere.  Because I really think there is somewhere to go.

Karla Harby: I started the flute at 36, a few years ago. There is no question that seriously studying music has changed how I write, although whether this is good or not remains to be judged by others. The most important gift the flute gives me, corny as it sounds, is another route of access to my inner emotional life, and the courage to let it inform my writing. When I was in J-school a professor said to me, “You could be a good writer if you’d only loosen up.” The flute speaks to that particular deficiency of mine.

In his mention of classical music, Jon is perhaps alluding to music theory, which is not really a theory at all but rather the detailed description of how music is put together, or structured. Studying music theory has not helped me structure articles or book chapters, not at all. The ways of communicating are just too different for me to find the connections, except in the most general, obvious ways that have already been mentioned.

Rather, for me it’s the micro-organization of music, the musical phrase that finds its analogy in the sentence, that has been the most instructive. The musician’s first problem is how to put the phrase across in a way that is meaningful, which means it must “say something” and be somehow “beautiful,” even if the actual sound is more like a growl. Playing the flute has made me more sensitive to the aesthetic possibilities of the sentence, and while I happen to emphasize classical music I certainly believe jazz, rock, country or any other musical style would do the same.

David Hayes: On the subject of writing and music, I use a music analogy borrowed from Studs Terkel when I’m talking about interviewing with my magazine feature writing students. Terkel described an interview as being similar to a jazz combo playing a standard like, say “My Funny Valentine.” First, as prearranged, the band together plays the familiar “head” or melody. Then, one musician begins to solo over the chord changes. At this point, nothing may sound like the familiar melody of “My Funny Valentine” because the musician is improvising. One by one, each instrument will take a turn soloing until finally the whole band returns to the “head” again and the song is over.

Here’s how the analogy relates to interviewing. Good journalists go into an interview having planned an approach to open the interview, and having planned on addressing some difficult subject areas at the end. In between, the journalist should try to let the conversation flow as naturally as possible, which means following the interviewee, being able to respond to directions the conversation takes rather than awkwardly returning to the next question on a list.

This, of course, means being well prepared for the interview. I don’t draw up a list of questions, but rather make short (three or four words) point form notes on a page, divided into topics such as “background” or “financial dealings” or “dissolution of company” or “challenges of success,” etc. Then I highlight each topic in the same color. Everything that falls under “financial dealings” might be highlighted in green, for example. Then, when my interviewee makes an unexpected segue from courting his spouse into financial dealings, I’m not left staring at a page full of interview questions. My eye flickers to the green highlighted material and I can adapt seamlessly to the conversation.

This doesn’t mean that as a journalist you may not steer your interviewee back to areas you want to pursue, but I find this technique gives me maximum flexibility during interviews.

Jon Franklin: Another parallel between writing dramatic nonfiction and performing music is rehearsal.  I used to rewrite many times – and still do, on stories that are one step down from top importance.  But if a story is really, really important to me I rehearse.  I write it, then start over with a blank screen and write it again, and again.  What happens is that, partly because I forget and partly because I get tired, I drop out stuff that isn’t on the main story line.  The last pass is the performance.  Then I may polish it, but it was the performance run that counted.

Roy Peter Clark: For five years now, I’ve offered workshops on the relationship between writing and music.  I have different titles, but my favorite is: “Voices of Respect: What I Learned about Writing from Listening to Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin.”

I begin by underlining the four direct ways to improve your writing:  by writing, by reading writers, by reading about writing, and by talking with editors, readers, and other writers.

Then I argue there are many other indirect ways to improve your writing. One is by engagement with the visual arts:  photography, videography, or just going to the movies.  Even recent popular movies, such as “The Blair Witch Project” or “Sixth Sense,” offer ideas about story pacing, scenic construction, what is described, what is withheld, that have practical application for the writer.

Just as we use many visual metaphors to describe writing, so we dip into the world of sound and music for metaphors such as:  voice, pace, cadence, rhythm, crescendo.  We talk about how a story “sounds,” even when we read it silently.

I try to demystify some of these connections by offering a list of musical tools writers can use:

1. Listen to how musicians adapt others material, how Aretha Franklin takes complete ownership and womanizes Otis Redding’s manly version of “Respect.” This leads to the question of how a reporter can take ownership of an editor’s assignments.
2. Use musical details in stories.  What song was playing on the car radio just before the collision?  Was it “Dead Man’s Curve” or “The Long and Winding Road”?
3. Borrow a voice.  Just as aspiring folk/rock kids used to imitate Dylan until they found their own voice, writers find writing voices they like, read them often, and try to imitate them.
4. Vary sentence length to create rhythm and pace.
5. Read the story aloud to HEAR what’s going on.
6. Play with the sounds of words, even in serious stories.
7. Think about the beginning and endings of stories by listening to the way songs begin and end.  Can a written story “fade out”?
8. Name the parts of the story.  Musical ability is related to spatial reasoning, which is important in math, or in trying to fit six suitcases into the trunk of a car.  But a story has space as well, and it takes skill to be able to fit the best stuff in it.
9. Listen to music for inspiration.  I’ve heard that legendary editor Michael Gartner plays Sousa marches on the way to work before he writes an editorial tearing into the city council.
10. Have a theme song. (Sorry, this is borrowed from Aly McBeal’s psychiatrist.)  But what is the song you hear in your head that identifies you in some special way?
11. More from McBeal:  Hire some Pips.  You need some back-up singers in your stories, the people you quote, whose voices harmonize with yours or create some counterpoint.
12. If they made a movie out of your story, what would be the musical score.
13. Use music as a reward, a celebration for work completed. Ta da.

Brett Campbell: As a writer who covers classical and jazz and all varieties of contemporary music and (to my wife’s annoyance) listens to recordings of it more or less constantly throughout my waking hours, I can’t resist adding a grace note to this thread. I find most of the attempts here to analogize music and writing to be merely that: analogies, not true correspondences.  I don’t think there’s much direct, substantive influence between musical and literary forms, although I often see stories divided into sections called “interludes” or “movements” or some such. But that just strikes me as more superficial, though maybe useful, analogizing.

Writers and composers both have needs for certain analogous formal devices, such as the use of repeated figures (call them fugues or refrains or whatever), but my guess is that most of us arrive at them based on our own respective needs, not because we encountered them in the other art form. I’ve had readers ask me if I structured a literary nonfiction story (about a person in the music business) along some sort of musical lines and had to reply honestly that I hadn’t. The story and complication/resolution approach dictated the form I chose. I’m glad they found the prose to be musical, though.

That said, I do think music can have a less direct, even subconscious influence on writers.  I agree with Jon that listening to music can be invaluable to a writer’s voice; I’ve been accused of having a lyrical style in certain stories and I’m sure that to whatever extent that’s true, much of the blame lies in my exposure to music and perhaps poetry. I do hear rhythms in my head when I’m composing sentences and paragraphs, and when I revise sentences, it’s often as much for sound and rhythmic variety or appropriateness as for clarity.

Surely the gonzo journalism of the ’60s and ’70s owes a good deal of its attitude and feel to rock and roll, and I guess the Beats tried hard to jazz up their writing to reflect the bop they were listening to. I’m not a composer, but I’ve interviewed a number of them, and one useful lesson from them (or any other artist) for writers is this: the purpose of art is to affect us emotionally. Even composers who use so-called “process” music, or jazzers and other improvisers, are generally thinking about how the audience will be moved by placing this note here or voicing this chord just so. That’s a lesson that journalists who aspire to do more than efficiently convey information – honorable as that is – can profit from.

As I’m writing this,  Mozart’s sublime “Clarinet Concerto” is playing on the radio. I don’t know whether listening to something of such surpassing beauty makes me smarter, or a better writer, or a better person, and I wouldn’t blame Mozart for any infelicities in this post. But perhaps in stretching my emotional range, such music can help me be a better literary artist by giving me more emotional resources to draw on, and a sense of what emotional effect I want my stories to have on readers.

Music can be salutary for writers in other ways, too. Some of it provides good background sound for writing, but of course if you want to get anything more out of great music – from Bach to the Beatles – you must pay attention, and you can’t do that while writing. I’ve recently started playing in a music group, and I find the chief effect of performing music on writing is to leave me less time for it. However, I think there’s a benefit there: The sheer emotional pleasure of playing music you like (especially in a group setting) can be a welcome relief from the left-brain, intellectualized, concentrated thinking that writing entails. It works a different part of your mind and soul, and if nothing else provides a nice break from staring at the screen all day. I’m sure yoga or athletics can do the same. Since I took up music and tennis, I’m writing less, but enjoying it more, and maybe feeling more refreshed when I do write. I hope that shows up in the stories.

Mostly, though, I hope writers don’t view music as “instrumental” in the sense that its main purpose is to make you a better writer or teach you formal devices. For me, its value – to anyone – is that great music endows our lives with the greatest beauty and is one of the prime sources of emotional fulfillment. And now I’m going to pay attention to Mozart for a while.

Jon Franklin: There seems to be two sorts of artists, one who must believe some things are unexplainable and others who believe they must be explained.  I’m the second, of course; this may of course be for lack of natural talent, which forces me to learn to read the music – if I were a musician.

Beyond that, I agree with Brett that the art we immerse ourselves in ultimately has a profound impact on our own art.  Who we read, what we listen to, the paintings we choose to pay attention to … these are among the more important things that make us what we are. Our own voices, to use a common example, often are reflections of the voices we hear.

All of which is to say: Be careful to only steal from the best, even unconsciously.

Don Obe:  Perhaps the loveliest example of lyrical cadence in modern English prose is Hemingway’s first paragraph in “A Farewell to Arms.” Though it begins a novel, it could just as well be a nonfiction passage. For those of you who don’t know it by heart, it goes:

“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.”

Of that famous passage, Hemingway once said: “In the first paragraph of ‘Farewell’ I used the word ‘and’ consciously over and over the way Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach used a note in music when he was emitting counterpoint. I can almost write like Mr. Johann sometimes – or, anyway, so he would like it.”

Terrie Claflin Martin: So what does all this discussion over music and writing mean to someone who plays piano by ear?  I’m not good enough for anyone else to listen to, but for most of my life I have loved sitting down late at night to pick out a tune, search out the harmonizing notes and discover the chord – one key at a time. I have never taken lessons, never studied theory, but I “know” when what I play is “right.”

I write the same way.  I plunk down words, one at a time, listening to how they sound – individually and in strings.  I say them out loud, whisper them softly, looking for rhythm.  I make sure that certain passages run smooth, while others snap!  I play the sentence or paragraph over and over again, just as I would on the piano, until I know it by heart and can say it with my eyes closed.  And again, I know when it’s “right.” I can hear it.

I’ve certainly taken writing classes – and now teach them – but I still have little interest in knowing the parts of speech or examining how they work together. (I say this with great apologies and respect for those on the list who do.)  I never knew what a transition was until I began teaching.  All I knew was that if I wrote in a certain way, where my words and sentences linked together like a chain, it read better – and it was almost impossible for a bad editor to insert, delete or change a word.

I must admit, I pray daily that my students won’t ask me technical questions that will trip me up.  We certainly go over all the literary devices.  I hand them all the tools they will need.  But by the end of the term I probably sound more like a journalistic obi-wan: close your eyes, listen, feel the words, trust that when it is right you will know it.

Some feel it, some don’t – in writing and in music.  My niece has been taking piano lessons for most of her life; she can play the heck out of a piece of sheet music, but without the paper in front of her, she’s lost.  I think most of my students are in the same category.  They will make fine reporters, and write fine stories, but their words will seldom “sing.” and they may never understand why because they are writing off-key and can’t even hear it.

So, I’m curious: anybody else out there play by ear?  Or know anything about it?

Lynn Franklin: To answer Terrie’s question:  I play the piano by ear as well as read music.  If I don’t have access to sheet music, I can pick out a tune and create chords to go with it.  As I child, I even experimented with composing.

I don’t know a lot of music theory; my piano teacher believed a young student would stay interested longer if allowed to choose the music.  (So my first “song” on the piano was “Wipe Out.”)  Yet what little theory I DO know helps a lot when playing by ear.  Knowing which chords classically accompany the key of “C”, for example, makes it quicker to create harmony.  Quicker and more likely to work.

I’ve found this also to be true in writing.  Again, I don’t have formal training in grammar; I came through the education system just at the time when students were NOT taught to diagram sentences.  What I’ve learned I’ve had to pick out through my own research.  Yet the theory I do know is incredibly helpful.  There is little more frightening than writing an article that people love – and you don’t know HOW you did it!  So the terrors take over:  Will I ever be able to do it again? 

In contrast, when you know that the article in question followed a classic complication/resolution form, that you slaved for hours over the transitions to make them smooth (something I still struggle with), that you specifically listened for rhythm in the sentences and pacing throughout, then you can be pretty sure that if you apply those same techniques to the next story, you’ve got a shot at another piece the readers will love.  In other words, one of the benefits of knowing any kind of theory is that you gain the ability to repeat a good performance.

Terrie is absolutely correct in that theory isn’t everything.  Any artist, whether writer or musician, must be able to hear and feel the work of art.  However, there are two kinds of hearing and feeling – educated and uneducated.  Uneducated feelings are the ones that reassure writers even when they are bullshitting themselves.  We’ve all done this.  It often occurs when we’ve slaved over a paragraph and then decide it’s the most poetic thing we’ve ever written.  Then an editor or a friend singles out that particular paragraph and points out that it does nothing to move the story and is nothing more than writing.  Even the most experienced writers succumb to this temptation.  This is why many famous writers recommend that you throw out your babies during the editing process.

Educated feelings are those that are reinforced by readers’ reaction to a passage or a piece.  To give an example that most members are familiar with, when Jon finished writing “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” his heart was pounding.  It was the first time this ever happened to him, and it was different from the feeling, “I’ve just written something wonderful.”  It was frightening. 

He said the feeling was similar to those I’ve described as “uneducated,” but different somehow.  The difference, of course, was that he wasn’t bullshitting himself. 

John Steinbeck described this feeling as holding fire in one’s hands.  Once you’ve experienced this, you can more easily tell if a feeling about a particular passage is real power or wishful thinking.  Even then, it’s not easy.  In recent years, I’ve only heard Jon compare a feeling about a piece to “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster” twice – once was “A Death in the Family.”  The second is a piece he’s working on now.

There are levels of educated feelings, and most writers experience these.  Sometimes you suddenly know that a particular transition works; the feeling is not exactly holding fire in ones’ hand.  It’s more a jolt of control.  When those feelings occur, it really helps to stop and compare them to the uneducated feelings that said something worked when it didn’t.  After a while, most people will be able to develop Terrie’s ability to differentiate.

What I’m saying is that theory is the intellectual aspect of feeling.  Great writers and, I suspect, musicians and artists use both feeling and theory.  In those times when you’re not sure a feeling is apt, theory can often save the story from becoming simple self-indulgence.

I should add that theory eventually becomes incorporated into the subconscious so that it helps you differentiate between feelings of power and feelings that are self-delusions.  When I pick out a song on the piano, I don’t consciously tell myself that the most common chord for the key of “C” consists of C, E and G; my fingers just naturally reach for those keys.  The same happens while writing; you naturally recognize a particular action as your story’s complication without actually putting that into words.

Name withheld:  Terrie Claflin’s post struck a chord with me – and that’s about as musical as I will get. But when it comes to writing, I definitely play by ear, letting instinct, intuition and feeling lead the way. However, they share the lead with the rules and techniques I’ve learned along the way. I was fortunate to have a good education when I was young, and the rules of grammar and syntax, enhanced by several years of Latin, are part of my autonomic writing system. I don’t think much about avoiding passive voice because that, too has been drilled into the subconscious. Bridges, sentence length and all those other techniques rarely require active thought.

I suspect Terrie functions the same way. She doesn’t think much about technique because she’s incorporated it into … the process, allowing her to focus more on creativity. (And Terrie is unquestionably the most creative writer I have ever worked with. As with all my favorite writers, I wish she would give us more.)

When people ask me questions about grammar or syntax, I usually have to reach for a reference book. I can tell them what is right and what is wrong, but unless it’s fairly simple, the why is not always accessible.

Still, I think it’s important to continue to improve technique, to add more tools to the box. That’s one of the reasons I’ve subscribed to this list for four or five years. As we move into new areas, such as writing for the web, we need to refine our style. Even if we stay with the same kind of writing, refinement and growth are important. Otherwise, to return to musicology, we’ll be the writing equivalent of John Denver singing “Rocky Mountain High” the same way, over and over and over. And even this musically challenged person would prefer Chinese water torture.

Jon Franklin: With regard to playing by ear, it certainly can be done, and done well.  In music, though, there are limits imposed by complexity.  One could play a ballad by ear, for example, but not a symphony.  A symphony involves some serious logistical problems, if I may call them that.  Different instruments coming in and out at different times, recurring themes that have to be remembered exactly in order to vary them properly.  All that.

I think writing is the same way.  We told stories long before Homer, but as we told them, and the generations passed, the stories got more complicated. Then, in western civilization at least, certain people like Emerson and Chekhov started studying how stories worked.  They didn’t do this to impose form.  Both of them were looking for an advantage they believed some theoretical knowledge might convey.

It gets to the point, in modern times, when certain kinds of stories can only be told with a team effort of some sort.  I have written books with partners that I could never have written alone.  I just couldn’t have done everything and kept track of everything.  But if you’re going to work with someone else you have to have a language, and to have a language you have to nail down specific concepts to talk about.

This is also true in relationships between writers and editors.  They have to be able to communicate.  If the piece in question is not complex or multi-leveled, of course, communication can be pretty guttural.  But if it IS multi-leveled, say, the editing process will require an explicit discussion of the individual levels.  That requires language.  Language requires taxonomy.  Taxonomy is difficult to construct without theories pushing their snouts into the effort.

I think there will always be writers who write totally by feel, and we can argue the advantages and disadvantages of that.  But it definitely imposes a limit of complexity.  Murray Kempton (I hope I’m spelling his name right) once told me he wrote totally by feel, and a little later in the same conversation he remarked that he could never hold together a piece longer than about 800 words.  But, of course, it was often an incredible 800 words.

On the other end of the spectrum, those of us who find structured thinking useful believe that, with that thinking, we might be able to write symphonically.  That’s the motive, at any rate.  Structure, for example, is a tool … much in the same way Lotus is a tool.  And there are levels of tools.  Structure has been called “story grammar” but what we usually refer to as grammar is something quite different.  I’m very theory-oriented, as many of you know, but I don’t know jack about grammar.  And yeah, there are a lot of people who possess a mind-numbing knowledge of grammar but who don’t write all that well.

So it depends on the tool.  But then, tools are transcendent, and they can be beautiful for their own sake.