Music and Writing

[suelder]

The session I attended at Boskone was a gentleman from Scotland who is planning a thread involving music and science fiction for a con in England.  I want to go to it, but there's no way I can get the time off in April :P

One of the threads involves the structure of music and the structure of a novel and the parallels thereof.  It's something I've

Comments

[albathetross]

I think there are a ton of parallels between (good) music and (good) writing. Macro-structure -- buildup, climax, brief denouement. Microstructure -- each scene being like a chord progression that tumbles you inevitably into the next. Tension is a lot like dissonance -- that 7th chord that wants desperately to resolve into the octave, but you have to introduce an additional dissonance as it does so that not everything is resolved and the reader / listener feels compelled to keep going until you hit the final resolution.

[suelder]

very nice analogy - tension and dissonance. You want that resolution or the piece (music or writing) doesn't satisfy.

[shtick_figure]

While reading a part of Maas' Writing the Breakout Novel, he mentions playing with the "volume" of a scene. Taking a scene and making it bigger, more outrageous, more daring. Or taking that same scene and making it smaller, quieter.

I'd always thought of changing scenes like that in terms of crescendo and dimuendo. Actually, I'd usually hear my music teachers saying that music would be boring if it were all the same volume. The same is true for novels.

I can see how there are many parallels between music and writing. I used to be a jazz drummer, and THE most important thing is rhythm, AND change. Ever hear a musician play to a drum machine? It sounds too mechanical. There's no give and take, no flow, no change, no improvisation. Writing can't be mechanical either.

[shtick_figure]

*whoops, I meant decresendo.

[abennettstrong]

I'll have to come back and read this in more detail later; just skimming now. I've been listening to the Tor podcasts, and there's an interview with the Brian Slattery, author of Spaceman Blues, in which he talks about how his career as a musician influenced his writing of the novel. He talked about writing sections of the novel to a certain beat -- and how he's performed bits of the novel, basically telling the band to play whatever they want as long as they maintain that rhythm. It sounded really interesting, and you might want to check it out.