All last week, I’d been writing a manuscript I couldn’t find the rhythm of. I have this thing where I think of books as rhythms. And if it’s off, the book’s wrong. I can’t read a book without a good rhythm, doesn’t matter how good the story is and I can’t write one either. I hate when you don’t feel like you’ve got anything as you write, when a story feels flat. When a story’s bad tonally. My manuscript felt like that. I kept writing. Kept trying to believe it would be fine next edit round. Bullshit. It doesn’t work like that. If it’s bad to begin with, it’ll stay bad each time. Around about 2am last Monday, I deleted 70,000 words.
A relief to be rid of them. All their heavy footedness. All their shuffling around. FUCKING DANCE PLEASE is what I wanted the manuscript to do. These next characters, they aren’t people who’re good at staying still. Maybe Ava was mad, maybe Anna was insane, these ones are different sure but same box maybe. We like what we like, love what we love, make what we make: not much you can do about it.
I don’t think I’ve ever learnt anything from a book about writing, apart from Edouard Leve’s Autobiography, but the hint’s in the name, it’s not really about writing, it’s about him - he says a book is either a narrow room or a spacious one, and although it’s all sounding a bit Biblical and I’m definitely paraphrasing, he’s onto something. If you can see the shape of the book you’re trying to write, the feel of it, the sense of how much air it contains at different times, when to suck everything out the atmosphere, when to punch, when to pull back, that’s when the book comes alive. That’s why you hit delete when it’s not doing it. There’s an instinct to it. Not that you’re meant to say it. You see interviews with Dylan and he’s trying to say it and trying not to say it at the same time. Not everything can be taught. Sure you can learn to get better but I’ll never be a pole-vaulter, I don’t possess the instinct for a jump or the talent or the right thighs. It happens.
I think I learn the most from lyrics and poems. I don’t write either. It’s best to leave the things you love the most well alone. But as a form, lyrics teach a lot. You can’t be on the nose with a lyric in the same way you can’t in a poem in the same way you absolutely mustn’t be in dialogue. A lyric teaches you no one ever says what they mean, and when you don’t say what you mean, that’s when you’re onto something, that’s when language gets interesting, that’s when it’s put to the test, that’s when tension, ambiguity, misunderstanding comes in, all the components of drama put to work.
No one wants to know you’re in love. No one wants to know you’re heartbroken. At least, no one wants to be told it. No one wants to know your mum’s died or your hamster’s drowned (happened to me) - no, they want the aftermath and they don’t want to be told it, they barely even want to be shown it - although that’s the best of the two - they want to feel it, to be right there alongside the characters and there’s something about a song that does this perfectly. Think of a song, you’ve got about 3.16 minutes to make a whole world, and sure you can have more, but imagine the economies of scale going on there, nothing and everything to play with. It’s bone, all the time. It’s really fucking beautiful.
When Max Ritvo’s Four Reincarnations was posthumously published, one review said it did exactly what poetry exists to do, in that it expressed what prose couldn’t. I think about this all the time. I think about this with lyrics. I think this is what I want to try and make novels do, to use the prose in a way that isn’t only for a story, but to somehow harness something that moves outside or at least at the margins of the verifiable proposition - a novel is the furthest from a verifiable proposition you can get, how boring to only replicate reality with it.
I listen to music when I work. Each book has a distinct soundtrack. Sometimes it makes me feel sick after. Most of the time, I can’t listen back to them. Apart from Lana Del Rey’s National Anthem, which I’ve written about before, Ava could only be written to it. I listened to it hundreds of times. Sometimes all in the same day. Voodoo does what voodoo will. This next manuscript spans decades and emotions. I struggle to write without feeling what my characters are. It’s perhaps a character flaw of my own. Music helps with the mood. I’ve also struggled to listen to Mastersystem’s Dance Music ever since May 2018. It’s a full stop on Scott Hutchison’s career, a heartbreaking one in that it hints at a new direction and a new confidence, but in retrospect, it tells the listener what’s coming next. It is wrong to confuse an artist with their art, it is also wrong to think you can ever fully separate the two. The final song, Bird is Bored of Flying, is heart-breaking. And it’s heart-breaking because it does what the best songs do, it tells life differently. This week, I decided to be brave, to fuck it, to put it on the stereo and listen. Notes on a Life not Quite Lived came on, and I listened to it on repeat and still am.
Notes on a Life maps perfectly onto both An Otherwise Disappointing Life from Frightened Rabbit’s final album, Painting of a Panic Attack, which is a tight closed airless room of an album in ways Dance Music isn’t; it also maps eerily onto Die Like a Rich Boy, the lyric, the future king, the future king, matching I’ll be Shakespeare’s moonstruck king. Each album lyrically a companion piece to the other in many ways, led by Hutchison’s preoccupations. Maybe I’m paying too much attention, likely I’m reading too much into it but certainly, Notes on a Life not Quite Lived, is perfect lyrically for what I’m trying to describe, a song that says everything but also possibly nothing at the same time, skirting, evading, eluding, a song filled with ellipses and absences, which is exactly how Ava Anna Ada was described to me at an event last week which might be exactly why I like it.
Recently, I have been starved of regional accents. I love a regional accent, mostly Scottish and mostly west coast even though I didn’t grow up there, but you get so hungry you stop being fussy. I haven’t left the south east of England for nearly three months. It’s too long. People enunciate here, and all of the time. I need to go somewhere they mumble, apologise for ever learning to speak at all. Somewhere you can talk shite about things being scuzzy and manky and rank and call people a good cunt and no one will take offence. When I feel like this, I listen to Frightened Rabbit and The Twilight Sad with the volume up so high the headphone warning kicks in but it stops me standing too close to strangers in pubs when I hear their accent. I’d happily lose at least some of my hearing just for the bit when Scott draws the eeeees right out on knees, on seen. I listen and I’m back home. Not just Scotland home but home home, Borders home. Not quite Scotland. Not quite England. People talk a lot about music and place and they like to intellectualise it when there’s not that much to be intellectualised about it, sometimes things sound like where they came from because that’s where they came from: the accent, the drums, the tradition, you work within your influences. It’s not always complicated. The best lyric in the whole song might be some of the best lyrics written (bold claim, I’ll change my mind soon) but maybe it’s one of the most Scottish, I’m sort of feeling a kind of maybe type of thing - ellipsis again. He’s saying nothing, he’s saying it all. It’s how we talk in Scotland, we can never say it, we’re never really feeling, just sort of when we’re feeling all the time. He does it again with almost Faulkner type constructions: not quite floating, not quite sinking. Back home we’re almost always not quite anything. It makes miss home more. It makes me remember home, the chip shop coal smelling air, the proper dark skies, the stars punching holes in it all. It makes me remember the Borders and it makes me remember myself and because of that, it makes me write better. You can’t write when you’re far from yourself. Or you can, but not well. When Frightened Rabbit put that they were from Glasgow on My Space, his mum wasn’t happy. They were from Selkirk. I can’t remember if they changed it back. You’re always where you’re from, never where you end up. And if the rhythm’s off, maybe it’s because you’ve forgotten that bit.
The rhythm of writing is so important, and rarely discussed! Children's books are a great way to discover writing with musical prose that flows like magic when you read it aloud (Gobbolino The Witch's Cat is an absolute delight on this front). Like you, I'm unable to read books that don't possess this quality. I'm reading Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain at the moment and the musicality or the writing is surprisingly sublime. I must find out who the ghostwriter was, if indeed there was one.