The latest episode of a self-help podcast called, A Life in Color, which happens to be the intellectual child of my lovely and talented niece, Laura Branch, used music as a metaphor of what’s missing in many corporate offices these days. Managers wants their employees to learn all the notes and meters, and the surest route to success is perform a tune that sounds perfectly fine every time. Rote recitation, no imagination required. In fact, she maintains, imagination is unwelcome in many corporate suites.
Taking Laura’s metaphor in a slightly different direction, perfectly fine music is aural equivalent of a Bob Ross painting or the product of a paint-by-numbers set. True musicians, however, understand that the spots on the leger lines mark only the outline of where master musicianship resides. For an instrumentalist, music can be reduced to a math problem, but for a musician, those marks on the page reflect the heart and soul of the composer. Through phrasing and passion, a gifted musician pulls life and emotion out of those sheets of paper.
There’s a kind of magical transference that happens that I don’t begin to understand, but most of us have experienced a swell of emotion as a reaction to a performance–sometimes it’s a piece that we have heard many times before without any emotion at all. Perhaps it’s the sheer beauty of it as in the finale of Mahler’s 8th Symphony–“The Symphony of A Thousand“–which choked me up yet again when I was finding the right cue for the link. (Please give it at least a 90-second listen.) A more contemporary example is Carrie Underwood’s performance of “How Great Thou Art” on last year’s “American Idol.” Perhaps it’s simply the story being told, as in David Ball’s “Riding With Private Malone.”
So, what does this have to do with writing? Well, pretty much everything.
Let’s be honest here. Perfectly fine storytelling isn’t that difficult. Artificial intelligence can take assigned plot points with designated twists and barf out a tale. It will bring the reader all the emotional satisfaction of a paint-by-numbers image. It won’t be bad but it won’t be good, either. It will just . . . be.
I don’t want to just be. I want to leave an emotional impact on my readers–whether it’s fear or excitement or sadness or triumph. I want to be a master musician of genre literature. Stories need to be more than conduits for plots and twists. Books we love connect with us emotionally because a human author infused that emotion into their work. It’s in the ebb and flow of developments. In turns of phrase. In pacing. In the unique and insightful peeks into the world through the author’s eyes.
But because a book is a work of art, there’s room for limitless interpretations of the author’s intent. Just as we can never know how Gustaf Mahler or W.A. Mozart phrased their work during performances, readers of my books cannot know the rhythm of words that I imagined as I wrote them. Emphasizing one word over another in a paragraph can make a huge difference. Passages intended to make readers chuckle may in fact offend a few. A scene I write to elicit a tear may cause some readers to roll their eyes. And that’s fine. I hear from readers who find symbolism that I did not intend, but that makes the symbolism no less real to those who see it.
The emotional connection is what counts. Like musical composition, a story is in its way an immortal piece of its creator’s soul. It lies silently until living person picks it up and interprets the author’s words through the filter of the reader’s own life experiences. The result is an experience that is close to but never precisely what the writer intended. The result is musical.
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On Sale Now. Listen to Jonathan and Digger talking about the book here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2A7Nn1sJyA