A Sun Came.

Yes, I understand this is lazy blogging.

But this song somehow felt right for today.

A Strange Overlap: Music and Words.

Sometimes I find myself listening to music and typing a story or some thoughts or whatever, and I start to get this weird desire to write something that might somehow match the music I'm listening to in order to connect the two mediums and make my experience complete.

I've never been able to fully separate music from words. One feeds into the other.

When I was younger, maybe in second or third grade or so and couldn't really write all that much, I would draw pictures of stories and listen to music on tape cassette to accompany it. I can write without listening to music, and I can definitely listen to music without writing, but when I'm really on a roll, and in the zone, the two are synched up, and I find one song on a loop as I type page upon page upon page. 

I listen to music while I'm reading too, and then whatever it is I was listening to while I was reading that book becomes forever associated with it. When I was a junior in high school, we read In Cold Blood, and I was listening to Soul Junk's 1956 at the time, and now I will forever connect the two. Same thing more recently:  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and All Delighted People. In both of these examples, the music does not really reflect the tone or subject matter of either novel. At all.

But, then again, I associate all music I listen to with certain periods in my life. And it isn't some vague, nostalgic feeling. It is a distinct, specific event or time. My husband thinks this might be one of my special little eccentricities. Virtually every single album I listen to has a connection to something else.  It doesn't just exist on its own, as its own separate entity. Like most things in life, it gets all tangled up with something else.

I'm fortunate to live in a day and age where music is so readily available, because otherwise I don't know what I would do with myself. I'd probably have to seriously take up an instrument. But it seems kind of difficult to play a sonata on the piano and write a novel simultaneously.

(On a side note: this may not be so difficult if it was playing a sonata and a video game simultaneously).

Sometimes the two activities manage to flow together well. But right before I began writing this post, I felt that horrible disjunction between the two. And I'm starting to think that this disjunction indicates something a bit more important: Whatever it was I was writing was getting BORING. So music has also become a bit of a litmus test. If the music I'm listening to can't get the job going, then I'm screwed, right?

Music makes everything better: chores, long commutes, movies, sex, food, books... life. Probably death too. 

I've heard some people argue about how this overload of music and ipods and things are actually bad for us. It's cluttering up our life, etc., and we should be engaging in Socratic dialogues somewhere instead, and so on. As a college instructor, there may be some truth to this, since it seems many people are becoming crippled by their inability to connect with others, and ipods can certainly make it easy to shut the outside world out.

But I think really great music makes for better connection.

I mean, the reason why concerts are such wonderful experiences is due to that sense of communal enjoyment. And this often happens among complete strangers. One can just bask in the sounds and the feeling of the music.

Although it's not an airtight argument, I think music proves God's existence. And it makes my writing work better. It feeds it and helps it grow. It's a little strange, and it maybe marks me as a Gen-Xer, but it's like the music goes from the machine, up the wire, into the headphones, into my ears, down my neck, shoulders, through my arms, and back into my fingertips, and so, onto the page (typing or writing, whatever). It's a cyclical pattern that obeys natural law: nothing is lost. It's all self-contained.

Now, if only I could figure out how music can help me write something I'm not all that inspired to write...

Writing Obscenity, and Listening to Jonsi. (Neither of which are actually related to each other...)

Before we begin: 

I've been a bit lax in my blog posting. I'm a little worried about what theme I should pick for it, since it appears most blogs have some sort of subject. I don't really want to pick a specific thing to focus on, though. Maybe that's a bit lazy of me to do, but it's been that kind of a year. Or two. I've been lazy, or at least, I've been rethinking ambitions and what place they should have in my life, which makes one seem  lazy. And this whole blog-business was supposed to be about discipline, and making sure I wrote something at least five days a week or so. So here is this random post about a couple things I've been thinking about. 

Thing #1: Vulgarity and Obscenity in my own Writing. 

I've been feeling more and more paranoid about this. I don't think of myself as all that vulgar or obscene, but it would seem that I maybe give off that impression, somehow. A friend recently observed: "You're like the Skinny Bitch writer, because you swear all the time!" True? Not sure. I don't mince words, anyway, and I don't really avoid talking about topics that might be considered "inappropriate." Plus, I think adolescent-boy humor is amazing. 

So, when I am writing, I do use somewhat colorful language at times, usually in character dialogue. It has to make sense, and it shouldn't detract from my writing, but it often feels necessary. Although a lot of the stuff I write is not "realistic" or realism, I think in order for a reader to suspend belief, they have to really believe in all the surrounding elements of the story. If everything is complete nonsense, then the book becomes nonsense. 

For example: In a film or a television show about gladiators, we can expect a certain amount of blood, dismemberment, foul language, lewd everything, sex, and other stuff. But in the show Spartacus, the level to which all of these things are taken is so extreme it becomes a joke. The writers probably had conversations like this: 

"Hm. We have not seen a single bare breast in this scene in over five minutes." 

"But this scene takes place at a Chuck-E-Cheese..."

"Yeah... but there has to be some way we can make this sexy and/or violent." 

"I know! We'll have a woman with gigantic implants start stripping and gyrating against the play-place before she openly breast feeds her eighteen year old son!"

"Yes!"

"Brilliant."

"And then, Chuck-E comes in with a sword through his stomach, spurting blood everywhere!"

"Yeah! Great!"

 (All right. Slight exaggeration. We all know there aren't any play-places at Chuck-E-Cheese.)

I do understand that this over-the-top extremism is a fantasy. People don't watch Spatacus to get a history lesson. It's a guilty-pleasure kind of show. I've never been into guilty pleasures. It's probably the wet-blanket New Englander in me. 

But it is equally nonsensical, (to draw an example from my own writing), to have a working-class, abrasive, alcoholic talk like Pollyanna. 

The trouble is: some people do not like this. My older sister is my first go-to editor/critic. I take her advice and suggestions about my writing very seriously. But she just cannot take "the f-bombs" as she puts it. She thinks it is ridiculous. But she mainly thinks it is ridiculous because she would never, ever drop an f-bomb. In fact, I'm pretty sure she has never uttered the word in her entire life. (Although she did try to use a much worse expletive in a particularly desperate move in Bananagrams). And I am about to join another writer's group made up of Christian writers, and I am a little worried. One is a friend of mine, and I don't think the others are judgmental or legalistic types, but still: there's no way my book (if it were to ever get published...) would ever be put in the Christian/Inspirational section at Barnes and Noble... 

I don't think this is something that can be neatly tied up and set aside. Everyone has his or her idea on how much or how little one should censor oneself. I guess it's just something that every writer has to decide to deal with in some sense. When it comes down to it, I think one should just do whatever it takes to tell the story in the best way possible. If this can't be done without a decapitation or characters making whoopie, whatever. You've got to do what you've got to do. I guess it comes down to a personal judgment call. Safe stories aren't always good stories, are they? And shocking, crazy-brutal stories don't guarantee quality either... 

Thing #2: Jonsi. 

I don't have that much to say about him. I just love him, and find his music wonderful.