Turning down the volume

For years, I listened to music while I wrote. When I was working on my first few novels, I went so far as to put together playlists of songs that embodied the atmosphere or mood I wanted to evoke, or simply songs that seemed conductive to creating the proper state of mind, and there’s no question that a lot of other writers do the same. (If you spend any time on the writing forums on Reddit, you’ll see some variation of the question “What’s your writing playlist?” posted once every couple of days.) This may have been due to the fact that my first serious attempts at writing coincided with a period in my twenties when most of us are listening to a lot of music anyway. And it resulted in some unexpected pleasures, in the form of highly personal associations between certain songs and the stories I was writing at the time. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to listen to Eternal Youth by Future Bible Heroes without thinking of my novelette “The Boneless One,” since it provided the backdrop to the wonderful weeks I spent researching and writing that story, and much of the tone and feel of my novel Eternal Empire is deliberately indebted to the song “If I Survive” by Hybrid, which I’ve always felt was a gorgeous soundtrack waiting for a plot to come along and do it justice.

Yet here’s the thing: I don’t think that this information is of any interest of all to anyone but me. It might be interesting to someone who has read the stories and also knows the songs—which I’m guessing is a category that consists of exactly one person—but even then, I don’t know if the connection has any real meaning. Aside from novels that incorporate certain songs explicitly into the text, as we see in writers as different as Nick Hornby and Stephen King, a writer’s recollection of a song that was playing while a story was written is no different from his memory of the view from his writing desk: it’s something that the author himself may treasure, but it has negligible impact on the reader’s experience. If anything, it may be a liability, since it lulls the writer into believing that there’s a resonance to the story that isn’t there at all. Movies can, and do, trade on the emotional associations that famous songs evoke, sometimes brilliantly, but novels don’t work in quite the same way. Even if you go so far as to use the lyrics as an epigraph, or even as the title itself, the result is only the faintest of echoes, which doesn’t stop writers from trying. (It’s no accident that if you search for a song like Adele’s “Set Fire to the Rain” on Fanfiction.net, you’ll find hundreds of stories.)

This is part of the reason why I prefer to write in silence these days. This isn’t an unbreakable rule: during the rewrite, I’ll often cue up a playlist of songs that I’ve come to think of as my revision music, if only because they take me back to the many long hours I spent as a teenager rewriting stories late into the night. (As it happens, they’re mostly songs from the B-sides collection Alternative by the Pet Shop Boys, the release of which coincided almost exactly with my first extended forays into fiction. Nostalgia, here as everywhere else, can be a powerful force.) During my first drafts, though, I’ve found that it’s better to keep things quiet. Even for Eternal Empire, which was the last of my novels to have a soundtrack of its own, I ended up turning the volume so low that I could barely hear it, and I finally switched it off altogether. There’s something to be said for silence as a means of encouraging words to come and fill that empty space, and this is as true when you’re seated at your desk as when you’re taking a walk. Music offers an illusion of intellectual and emotional engagement when we’re really just passively soaking up someone else’s feelings, and the gap between song and story is so wide that I no longer believe that the connection is a useful one.

This doesn’t mean that music doesn’t have a place in a writer’s life, or that you shouldn’t keep playing it if that’s the routine you’ve established. But I think it’s worth restoring it to its proper role, which is that of a stimulus for feelings that ought to be explored when the music stops. The best art, as I’ve noted elsewhere, serves as a kind of exercise room for the emotions, a chance for us to feel and remember things that we’ve never felt or tried to forgotten. Like everyone else, I’ll often hear a song on the radio or randomly on old playlist, like “Two-Headed Boy Part 2” by Neutral Milk Hotel, that reminds me of a period in my life I’ve neglected, or a whole continent of emotional space that I’ve failed to properly navigate. That’s a useful tool, and it’s one that every writer should utilize. The best way to draw on it, though, isn’t to play the song on an endless loop, but to listen to it once, turn it off, and then try to recapture those feelings in the ensuing quiet. If poetry, as Wordsworth said, is emotion recollected in tranquility, then perhaps fiction is music recollected—or reconstructed—in silence. If you’ve done it right, the music will be there. But it only comes after you’ve turned the volume down.

Reflektions on a life in art

Earlier this week, like just about everyone else I know, I picked up a copy of Reflektor, the fourth album by Arcade Fire. This isn’t a review, necessarily: I’ve listened to the album in bits and pieces, but I’ve only had the chance to play it straight through once, for some of the same reasons that have made it hard for me to watch an entire movie at home. And this is a band that has taught me to question my initial impressions. When The Suburbs was first released, it struck me as weaker than their previous two albums; now, it feels like their strongest work, and “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” is my favorite song of the decade. Reflektor certainly doesn’t lend itself to easy evaluation: it’s a double album, with the majority of its tracks pushing the six-minute mark, and the early reviews have resorted to all the usual adjectives—it’s sprawling, messy, flawed, indulgent, as if that weren’t true of all albums this length. Some are already calling it Arcade Fire’s Kid A, but its real counterpart, if you want to stick to Radiohead, is Hail to the Thief: it isn’t trying to reinvent pop music as we know it, but with its big, ragged tracks organized around the seed crystal of a memorable hook, it’s systematically pushing the boundaries of what we recognize as familiar.

In short, I like it a lot, and it confirms Arcade Fire as one of the two contemporary bands whose work I’ll always rush out to buy on the first day. The other is The Magnetic Fields, or, more precisely, the music from the mind of Stephin Merritt, whose Future Bible Heroes side project released a wonderful album earlier this year. At first glance, Merritt and Arcade Fire don’t have much in common, but to my ears, they’ve come to define two extremes of the kind of music I—and a lot of other listeners—care about so deeply. Merritt writes tight, spare novelty songs, the best of which often sound as if they were composed and recorded on a Casio keyboard; Arcade Fire throws everything into the mix, with lush, passionate orchestrations designed, at least in the early days, to have an entire auditorium singing along at the top of its lungs. (One of my favorite concert memories is seeing them play here in Chicago, with the crowd repeatedly trying and failing to join in at the right moment for the initial “Hey!” in “No Cars Go.”) Merritt is primarily a brilliant lyricist who writes catchy tunes as a sort of metacommentary on how cheap a resource a melody can be; Arcade Fire’s lyrics, while heartfelt, are usually the weakest link in their songs, which exist mainly to generate overpowering sonic emotions. And so on.

But I wouldn’t want to give either of them up. It’s fascinating to think of how they might approach similar material: Reflektor draws heavily on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, with a nod to Marcel Camus’s movie Black Orpheus, and while I can easily imagine Merritt writing a song on the subject, it would probably end up being a rhyming dictionary exercise on the word “Eurydice.” (“Idiosyncrasy,” “conspiracy,” “bureaucracy”—it practically writes itself.) If you like, you could even see them as dueling expressions of the existential and ironic philosophies of life. To Arcade Fire, the moral choices each one of us makes are crucially important, and we need to behave as if we were setting an example for the entire world. Win Butler, their lead singer and lyricist, is intensely concerned with the inner lives of children, with nature, with all we destroy in the name of progress. Nothing could be further from Merritt. When his songs aren’t talking about other songs, they’re focused on the sly dissection of a moment, on how our deepest feelings are shaped by the formulas we’ve heard on the radio, and, with rare exceptions, even his most emotional tracks are delivered with a wink: we’re constantly asked to consider how he does what he’s doing. It’s pop music written for other writers, which isn’t to say it can’t be moving. When Merritt allows real feeling to slip through, it means a great deal, and the result cuts even deeper than an Arcade Fire song that urges us with all its heart to feel the plight of the powerless.

Yet in their very different ways, the Magnetic Fields and Arcade Fire are linked by a sense of the overwhelming importance of music to how we think about ourselves. For Arcade Fire, this drama is played out within the context of individual songs, each one of which insists it could change your life; for Merritt, it’s a lifetime’s work, with every two-minute throwaway serving as another brick in an edifice that the artist is patiently building. Merritt never tries to pack everything he knows into one track: instead, he stands back and invites us to consider what it really means to devote one’s life to something as absurd as pop music. Of the two, I suspect that his work might end up being the most lasting, at least for me, if only because I relate more to his vision of an artist who is one step away from being an ingenious hack. It’s a recipe for a life in art, or for keeping one’s sanity in the face of the hollowness of the entire artistic enterprise, while Arcade Fire is a dream of how urgency, passion, and technical virtuosity can transform us into something more, if only for the space of a song. Both attitudes are necessary, and the ideal would be a band or artist who embodies both ends of the spectrum, alternatively or all at once—arch detachment balanced by passionate emotion, distance tempered by vulnerability, irony framed by compassion. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you can even dance to it. And I have a feeling it would look a lot like the Pet Shop Boys.

How an octopus saved my life

Note: To celebrate the premiere of the audio version of my novelette “The Boneless One,” which you can hear narrated by Josh Roseman this week on StarShipSofa, I’m reposting a pair of essays I wrote last year on the story’s origins. This post originally appeared on September 27, 2011.

My writing career has had its share of ups and downs, but one of its roughest moments came in the spring of 2008. At that point, I’d been out of a job for two years, working hard on my first, still unpublished novel, an epic adventure story set in India. A year before, I’d landed a very good agent in what struck me as record time, and we spent the next twelve months working on the book, paring it down from a quarter of a million words and transforming it from an adventure novel into more of a streamlined thriller. In the end, though, we couldn’t see eye to eye on what this novel was supposed to be, so we decided to part ways, leaving me with no agent and a novel I wasn’t sure I could sell. I was crushed, but ultimately, I did the only thing I could: I started looking for agents again. And in the meantime, I turned back to my first love, which was short science fiction.

Over the next six weeks, as I waited for responses—fruitlessly, as it turned out—from the next round of agents, I researched and wrote two novelettes. The second, “The Last Resort,” was picked up fairly quickly by Analog and published in their September 2009 issue. The first, “The Boneless One,” which was the first wholly original work of short fiction I’d written since college, wasn’t published until November 2011. And although it took a long time for this story to see print, I’m relieved it finally did, because it’s probably my favorite of my own novelettes—both because of its inherent virtues and because of the role it played in my life. When I began writing “The Boneless One,” I’d hit my first serious wall as a writer, and was filled with doubt as to whether I’d make it at all. And it wasn’t until I decided to write a story for my own pleasure that I remembered why I was doing this in the first place.

As a result, the memory of working on “The Boneless One” is one of my happiest memories as a writer. I began, as usual, by leafing through magazines, looking for an idea or two that might result in the germ of a plot. In this case, a few years earlier, I’d bought a trove of back issues of Discover and Scientific American, and while browsing through my collection, I came across two promising articles: one about luminescent ocean creatures, another about a global research voyage designed to catalog the previously undocumented genetic diversity of microscopic life in the sea. I’ve always been fascinated by oceanography, and love The Life Aquatic so much that I almost called this novelette The Knife Aquatic. And almost immediately, I saw the outlines of a story, about a research yacht that drifts into a ghostly school of glowing octopuses, and what happens in the aftermath.

Tomorrow, I’ll be talking more about how I conceived the story itself, which turned, rather unexpectedly, into a fair play murder mystery of exceptional gruesomeness. But today, I just want to reflect on the writing process, which was close to my ideal of how a writer’s life should be. I was living in Brooklyn at the time, so one afternoon, I took the train down to the New York Aquarium one with hopes of checking out an octopus or two. I didn’t see one—I think the octopus was hiding that day—but I still remember taking in the exhibits and a sea lion show, listening on my headphones to Eternal Youth by Future Bible Heroes, and trying to figure out the plot of this rather dark story. For the first time in over a year, after a grueling rewrite process, I remembered how it really felt to be a writer—to invent stories and characters just because I could. And for that, I have an octopus to thank.

If you’d like to read “The Boneless One,” you can find it in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, 29th Edition, edited by Gardner Dozois.

How an octopus saved my life

My writing career has had its share of ups and downs, but one of its roughest moments came in the spring of 2008. At that point, I’d been out of a job for two years, working hard on my first, still unpublished novel, an epic adventure story set in India. A year before, I’d landed a very good agent in what struck me as record time, and we spent the next twelve months working on the book, paring it down from a quarter of a million words and transforming it from an adventure novel into more of a streamlined thriller. In the end, though, we couldn’t see eye to eye on what this novel was supposed to be, so we decided to part ways, leaving me with no agent and a novel I wasn’t sure I could sell. I was crushed, but ultimately, I did the only thing I could: I started looking for agents again. And in the meantime, I turned back to my first love, which was short science fiction.

Over the next six weeks, as I waited for responses—fruitlessly, as it turned out—from the next round of agents, I researched and wrote two novelettes. The second, “The Last Resort,” was picked up fairly quickly by Analog and published in their September 2009 issue. The first, “The Boneless One,” which was the first wholly original work of short fiction I’d written since college, wasn’t published until this past month. And although it took a long time for this story to see print, I’m relieved it finally did, because it’s probably my favorite of my own novelettes—both because of its inherent virtues and because of the role it played in my life. When I began writing “The Boneless One,” I’d hit my first serious wall as a writer, and was filled with doubt as to whether I’d make it at all. And it wasn’t until I decided to write a story for my own pleasure that I remembered why I was doing this in the first place.

As a result, the memory of working on “The Boneless One” is one of my happiest memories as a writer. I began, as usual, by leafing through magazines, looking for an idea or two that might result in the germ of a plot. In this case, a few years earlier, I’d bought a trove of back issues of Discover and Scientific American, and while browsing through my collection, I came across two promising articles: one about luminescent ocean creatures, another about a global research voyage designed to catalog the previously undocumented genetic diversity of microscopic life in the sea. I’ve always been fascinated by oceanography, and love The Life Aquatic so much that I almost called this novelette The Knife Aquatic. And almost immediately, I saw the outlines of a story, about a research yacht that drifts into a ghostly school of glowing octopuses, and what happens in the aftermath.

Tomorrow, I’ll be talking more about how I conceived the story itself, which turned, rather unexpectedly, into a fair play murder mystery of exceptional gruesomeness. But today, I just want to reflect on the writing process, which was close to my ideal of how a writer’s life should be. I was living in Brooklyn at the time, so one afternoon, I took the train down to the New York Aquarium one with hopes of checking out an octopus or two. I didn’t see one—I think the octopus was hiding that day—but I still remember taking in the exhibits and a sea lion show, listening on my headphones to Eternal Youth by Future Bible Heroes, and trying to figure out the plot of this rather dark story. For the first time in over a year, after a grueling rewrite process, I remembered how it really felt to be a writer—to invent stories and characters just because I could. And for that, I have an octopus to thank.

For more on the writing of “The Boneless One,” please see here. And if you like, for a limited time, you can read the story itself for free.