Chapter 67: My Voice; My Song
Writerland is a newsletter from The Delacorte Review whose mission is to help writers tell the stories they need to tell.
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Several years ago I asked my students to come to class with a piece of music that sounded to them the way they wanted their writing to sound.
No lyrics. Just the music. Each student would play a segment of a minute or so and as they turned down the volume and left the music playing in the background, they’d explain what it was about this music that so resonated for them that they wanted to capture it in their writing.
They came to class with all sorts of music. Their choices were deliberately made and deeply felt; each of them articulated clearly and often passionately why the music spoke to them.
The exercise was so interesting that I’ve repeated over the years and only in time did I begin to see that what I thought might have been a fluke the first time was in fact a telling phenomenon: No two students in any class ever brought in the same music. Never.
In fact, even after doing this with perhaps 150 students, I cannot recall any piece of music being chosen twice. (Except by me; I always choose the same music – Gladys Knight and the Pips’ version of “Heard it Through the Grapevine,” for the key change at the one minute mark that so deftly moves the music from one chapter to the next.)
The genres the students chose appeared again and again: hip hop, world, classical, jazz, rock. And that made sense: we expect music, even experimental music, to conform to certain expectations, and when it doesn’t – when music violates our sense of how things should sound and what’s to come next – we get frustrated and tune out.
But it was what happened within those genres that I found so exciting. Every one of those students had a different song in her or his head, and by extension knew just what they wanted to hear in their writing. Emphasis on hear, because as much as reading is a visual experience – silent words on a page – our response to what we read is often an internally aural one: we respond to how we hear a story being told.
I wish I could tell you that exercise served as an epiphany – that having considered and chosen their music, the students were able to translate that sound to the page. The music, I suspect, remained for many of them an aspiration, a hope of what they might someday be able to achieve with words.
Perhaps that was enough for the moment. Or perhaps I was selling my students short. By the time they begin graduate school, after all, they’ve been writing for fifteen years, or longer. They have written thousands and maybe for the most ambitious among them, millions of words. Some possess more musical ears than others, and it shows in the ways they’ve learned to combine words and sentences to achieve a desired effect. But even those not blessed with such gifts are nonetheless seasoned; they have developed a skill set that should, in theory, allow them to convey what they want to say in a way they’d like to say it.
But that is too seldom the case. Faced with a blank page or screen, whatever music that might have played in their heads goes silent, and they are left to write without the benefit of sound.
So what goes wrong? Why is there such a gulf between aspiration and execution? Why does so much writing done by people with a keen and particular sense of music land flat? The answer, I believe, is not simply a lack of talent or practice; that’s too easy and too dismissive.
Rather, I have come to believe, it comes from spending too much time doing the wrong kind of practice: writing words without any sense of sound. Or better said, of rhythm.
Think of how you learned to write, and of what kind of writing was rewarded. I’d suggest that early on in school the students whose writing received the most praise - and who doesn’t want to please the teacher? – wrote the most words. More words filled the page and demonstrated a desire to write, an eagerness, a certain ambition. An economy of words, by extension, was viewed as a deficit.
I suspect this did not change much over time. The more words you wrote the greater the reward, the higher the grade, the more effusive the praise at home. I know this because by the time many students come to journalism school they carry with them an internalized sense of what will, yes, please the new teacher, me: more words.
I have never put the question to students, but I can imagine the reply if I asked whether they wanted a three-minute song to be twice or three times as long. No way, they’d say. Too long. Boring.
But ask if writing more words for the sake of more isn’t a good thing. Preferably with lots of commas and dependent clauses. Of course. More is good, no?
Instead, I ask something else of my students whose writing lacks a sense of music, or rhythm. I ask them to try something different: write without commas. I do not say, use simple declarative sentences or active verbs because that does not really do the trick. Instead, a ban on commas and any punctuation except when needed to end a direct quote.
This means you cannot write: John, 40, is a plumber and married father of three.
Instead you must write: John is 40. He is married. He has three children.
Clunky, I know. But note what happens. Or better still, tap out the words as if you were drumming. John is 40… One two three. One two three. One two three four.
Drum it again. Now, do the same with the second stanza: He is angry. He is frustrated. He wants a change.
1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3, 4.
I am not attempting to propagate the writing world with Raymond Carver-esque minimalists. I am instead trying to show how different writing can read - and sound – when it’s done to a rhythm, when there’s a tempo that, as with music, pulls you in and along.
I keep students on this regimen for a week or two, at the end of which they’ve internalized something they have always felt but could never seem to achieve: writing to the music in their heads. Building on the beat. Adding a new one, then another. Everything working off the rhythm and not the melody.
After those two weeks I will allow them to introduce commas and even the odd semicolon. But it’s often the case by that point that they find they don’t need them quite so much. By then they’ve graduated to reading their stories outloud to themselves, to see how it sounds, to eliminate the words that throw things off.
It is a wonderful thing to watch writers discover their songs.
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