Music and Writing

Looking at grad school programs. Some of them are really interested in making sure writers know how to talk about their writing process. This is a mysterious and personal subject. Certain things help everyone, but no two processes are exactly alike and no method will always work. Everyone hits a wall sometimes.

I like to listen to music. But it has to be a certain kind of music. I love music I can sing along to, but that makes trouble when I am supposed to be writing because I end up typing song lyrics in with whatever I'm working on.
The solution to this is sound tracks and classical music without vocals, or with vocals in another language.

Recently I have been reading various authors talk about what it feels like when they are writing well. A lot of people describe a feeling of discovery rather than creation, letting characters go their own way, rather than inventing a character and making them do certain things. I don't know if I've ever had that experience. But I have slipped into a mode where ideas come and language flow easily and it builds until I am not stopping to scratch my head about how I'm going to describe something or come up with a motivation for a character to do something. It's a really great feeling.

In trying to articulate this, I found myself using the same kind of language that I might use to describe some of the music I like to listen to when I write. This is what it feels like. 

(and if you haven't seen How To Train Your Dragon, you should look up the clip that corresponds to this track. Animators having fun with body language, no dialogue necessary.)

And before this dragon movie became my guilty pleasure, (along with kung fu panda) I listened to this:

That's what a good writing day sounds like.

Reading for spite

The Tapestry:
The Hound of Rowan
By Henry Neff 

I had to look it up to figure out which of these titles was for the book, and which is for the series. My research says that the book is called "The HOund of Rowan" and "The Tapestry" is the name of the series. Neither title makes much sense to me, but whatever.

This series seems to be a shameless knock off of Harry Potter. It involves a boy named Max who discovers that he has magical powers and is immediately swept off to a school where he will learn to use them. There are magical creatures, wacky teachers, special games, lighthearted banter between new friends, a bully, and rule breaking. What would happen if Harry Potter went to school on the East coast of the good old USA?

Some special and unique features of this book are an ogre and a hag who make the meals at the school. Magical bedroom and room mate selection, creatures that can only be described as seriously evil werewolves on steroids, a singing bullfrog that removes, ahem, social inhibitions, magical pets and an ancient ship which student must not sleep on lest its sea dwelling guardian make waves that toss them overboard.

Generally, I think knock offs are rather annoying. But I gave this one a chance because I am curious to see if other authors are trying to amend Rowling as I would like to. I rather hate Rowling for failing to deliver on so many good ideas. She is really good at half the things you need to tell a good story. But this is a rant for another post. I can't help comparing this book to Potter, since it's clearly in the same sub-genre. It's an interesting comparison.

I enjoyed this book because most of the characters were believable. They were distinctive and memorable, yet not overly simplified. The adults were reasonably competent and mature and also had believable disagreements, personal grudges and biases. The children were petty and rude, often terrified, secretive, hot tempered, and sometimes rose above what was expected of people their age to show real virtue. There was one exception. I guess you could call him the Draco Malfoy equivalent. They never gave him even Draco's excuse for his bad behavior. He was just mean for the sake of being mean. Maybe they will further explain his character in another book. I was awfully proud of Max, however, because he was willing to put aside their animosity when it really counted.

I disliked some of the narrative choices the author made. There were scenes that were merely passing jokes and insignificant insidence that were not written as such. They were sometimes given more narraitve weight, so to speak. A reader can sense when the author is giving them a detail they are supposed to pay attentiong to. One of Rowling's strengths is that she is really good at leaving hints around, leading her reader on, and then tying it all up like a Christmas package. In The Tapestry there are several dramatic events that ought to hide some kind of secret or clue to be reincorporated later, and they don't. It would be tempting to dwell on such events just for the sake of the humor or drama of the whole thing. But they didn't actually have the significance in the greater story to merit it.

Another stylistic thing that bothered me was the Neff's habit of ending chapters with drawn knives, pointed guns, strangers stepping out of shadows, or new clues being uncovered, only to pick up two weeks later in the next chapter. We are not given the benefit of seeing how the characters process these dramatic events. We must just assume that they did and latch on to whatever they are interested in now.

Another thing I loved about this book was that there was no thirty pages of exposition right before the final action of the climax. The explanation of the mysterious bad things that keep happening is revealed slowly throughout most of the book and the last hundred pages are pretty non stop action with only minimal explanation. Some questions are never explained but merely proved. A character who has been portrayed as a villain for the first half, swears his good intentions half way through, leaving us in confusion, and then proves what side he is on in the climax. No explanation necessary.

Speaking of the climax, wow. The immediacy of the whole thing and the high stakes made it pretty darn intense. The climax of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (my favorite book so far) comes close. Creepy ritual, blood, desperate fighting, painful sacrifice, heroics. Only without the long monologue from the big bad guy.

Overall, The Hound of Rowan's tone was less charming (if just as whimsical. Did I mention Max has to babysit goslings for a goose who likes to shout insults at the referee at sporting events?) and darker than Potter's world in the early books. Come to think of it, it was less emotional. There was no lack of children with tragic pasts, but no one was threatening to take away Maxes birthday, so there was not the same tug on the old heart strings. Neff is weak in some of the areas in which Rowling shines, but also very strong in some areas that I think Rowling could use some work.

So, what about knock offs? Do we give our unswerving allegiance to originals only? Or do we allow imitation to be the most sincere form of flattery? If it is obviously an imitation, but done really well, does that make a difference? Is it a crime against the original creator, or homage to their art?

Reading for pleasure

Rosemary Sutcliff liked to write in very ancient ages. A clash of invaders and natives of the British isles, usually. Knight's Fee, which I just finished reading (in tears) is set at the end of the eleventh century. That's a little more modern than some of her stories. The Eagles of the Ninth just got made into a movie. I haven't seen it yet. I wonder how Sutcliff would translate to screen. If any of you have seen it, (and better yet if you have also read the book) please tell me how you liked it. That one, of course, is set when the Romans were running around Britain. King Arther figures in one series and my favorite was set in the Bronze age.


She does not have a lot of flashy marketing appeal. It is sort of a dense read, thick with atmosphere and rich language, not the snappy images that we get in a lot of youth lit. I like to write a picture in a few words, but there is also something about describing a voice as "hairless" that makes for more sensual experience. She dips her reader into this lugubrious world so that we start to smell and taste it.

The story itself was not fantastic or even very original. It's simple and true, exploring the growth of a human heart. I guess she probably could have sold it as a rags to riches cinderella story. Boy raised among hunting hounds (and beaten with them) becomes a knight at the age of twenty-two. But that's like saying that The Lord of the Rings is about lost jewelry.

I suppose I like this, and most of Sutcliff's books because it is really a friendship story. Mostly, she writes stories about male friendship. I wonder if she ever wrote about girl friends... I'll have to look it up. The heart of this story is the little moments that make a friendship. In this book, a goldfinch is the beginning of the central friendship. The two boys being quiet together, beating each other up, sharing a public moment in a very private way. These slow, subtle events are so true to real life, though few of us really think about the difference a goldfinch makes in a relationship.



So, the bottom line is, I would read Rosemary Sutcliff no matter what she wrote about because her language is so beautiful. It just so happens that she likes to write about one of my favorite topics; friendship.

P. S.
Sun Horse, Moon Horse was not the first Sutcliff book I read, but for some reason, it is my favorite. I don't remember much about it. Spoiler: it ends with the death of the main character and it's quite a horrible death. But I would have been disappointed with anything less. For a long time I thought I had imagined that I had read it, or dreamed that it was a Sutcliff book, because I couldn't find it on any of the lists of her books and I couldn't remember the name. But there it is. It's real and I liked it.