The concert was today? My father's gonna kill me!

The title to this post started off with a quote from a childhood film. If you don't get the reference then it probably won't do any good to explain, so I'll just jump into the meat of this post.

Music.

There is plenty of music in the world today. I think that's a good thing. I like music. I love the almost mystical power it has to move us directly to an emotional state. Really if you think about it, that's the power of music. But why? How? How is it that sounds cause an almost universal reaction? My son was playing a video game and he said, "Dad, this part of the game kinda makes me want to cry because of the music." Bing! Right on son. You have discovered the manipulative tool. And it's not just melody. Rhythms can increase or decrease our heart rate. Harmonies or dissonance can make us nervous or relaxed. And I'm sure there's more that I don't even know about. What am I saying? If you want to experience real life magic where John Williams is the musical equivalent of Howell Jenkins, then get into composing. This music is powerful stuff.

So, what does this have to do with writing?

Well, if music is such a powerful facet of the human experience then we want to tap that. We want to capture the experience that music brings to our lives in a way that shows its power. But how do we do that? One of the strengths of music is that we can experience it as a background to anything else we are experiencing. Working out? Put on some music. Watching a movie? Listen to the soundtrack. Having dinner? Throw on some tunes. Driving down the highway? You get the picture. As an experience, music ties itself to whatever we are doing in a non-invasive way. With few exceptions, we don't listen to music just for the music's sake (this is not always true, and enjoying music on its own can also be a powerful experience). Music is magic funneled into our ears and through every cell in our body that feels the vibration of sound waves.

Unfortunately, when reading a book we don't have sound. Books don't have the sheer aural power that even one single note can bring. We can read the book out loud, but the magic of books is in the words, not the music.

This causes problems for writers in a few ways. First, since we can't draw on the aural strengths of melody, rhythm, syncopation, harmony, disonance, etc., we often rely on lyrics. I mean, lyrics are words right? All I have to do is put the right words in and my reader will be drawn into the song, right? Wrooooong.

In novels, at least the novels of today, we don't write in poetry. Our entire purpose as authors is to draw our readers so far into our words that they simply absorb the experience. Poetry, though writing, has different goals. Poetry is all about imagery, rhythm, and hidden meaning. We can use all of those tools in storytelling, but when we switch from engaging prose to occlusive lyric the sudden shift in style can jar us out of the experience. In my own reading, when I am presented with lyrics or poetry (especially when not directly necessary for the plot or story) I skip it. I jump down to the next line of prose and say, "What next?" Now this is not always the case, but more often than not it is.

So how can we harness the power of music in our stories? How can we limit the jarring effect of lyrics? I've seen it done before, and in the next post I'll posit a few ideas of my own on how we can use music in our books.