Tricky Rhythms

Sarah Hatsuko Hicks, over at the Inside the Classics blog, has written again (“Preparation Throes” Tuesday, April 22, 2008) about preparing a music score for conducting in a performance, this time breaking out the tricky rhythms and the big mixed-meter section in the middle of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring.  I love reading her posts on this subject because she is so clear and descriptive.  I always have Evan in mind so I love learning from a conductor about how conductors work.  Thanks, Sarah.

In Perceval, Evan travels to Amsterdam to conduct the Concertgebouw Orchestra during their American Music Festival.  On his all-American program, he’s included Copland’s Appalachian Spring.  While writing the initial drafts, I listened to this music over and over, even though I already knew it quite well.  But I didn’t search out a score to use as reference.  I wasn’t interested in focusing on the technical aspects of conducting.  First I wrote Evan conducting this piece in concert and suffering a memory lapse in the middle of it — right where the meters get all mixed.  That version remained through several more drafts until I realized that for narrative purposes it wouldn’t work that way.  Then I decided that he’d have the psychological fugue moment at the end of the previous piece on the program, Barber’s Adagio for Strings.  And that clicked for the narrative.  So, I ended up showing/writing Evan conducting the Barber instead of the Copland.  

When I write/show Evan working on the podium, I am mindful of narrative purpose: how does this scene move the story forward or reveal character?  So, it is less about the conducting than about Evan.  I spend a lot of time listening to the music he’ll conduct, but much less time reading the score.  It is my challenge to describe in general Evan’s conducting but create the illusion that it is specific regarding his gestures, thoughts, etc.  The purpose for Evan on the podium is always: how does this reveal Evan as a person?  Not necessarily his stick technique or if he missed that cue for the flute.

Score study and preparation consumes hours of Evan’s time.  Again, writing about it needs to serve narrative purpose, so I approach these scenes much as I have the concert or rehearsal scenes.  The difference is that I do use scores as references so that I can write Evan thinking about the challenges of specific sections of music, making notes on the score, etc.  In Perceval, the score that he’s working on through most of the story is Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.  Since I am not a conductor, I sought out a conductor to help me identify passages in the score that might concern Evan.  Then I used the Mahler to also reflect back through music what Evan was experiencing in his life through Evan’s reading and understanding of the score.  Hard work for him.  Hard work for me, too.

Why spend so much time and space on Evan’s conducting?  Early in the novel, he thinks about the podium as his home and music as his heart, his motivation for living.  It is all he has in the world.  Showing that is important to his character and its development, and how he behaves in other situations in the story.     

Character Creation — “There Will Be Blood”

As an addition to my previous post about characters and language, watching actors at work inspires me and provokes me to think about how important detail is when creating a character.

Over the weekend I finally saw the movie There Will Be Blood.  Daniel Day Lewis played the main character, Daniel Plainview, an “oilman” who wants to make enough money so he can live someplace away from people.  Day Lewis uses everything at his disposal to create Plainview — his body, gestures, manner of speaking, his silences also, the way he walks and runs.  Plainview is a man who walks with his shoulders hunched in self-protection, closed, his legs bowed and with a slight limp from a broken leg at the beginning of the movie.  There is also a slinking quality to his walk and movements.  His expression however is one of confidence, knowing, being in control.  I love seeing the incongruities, and master actors most often bring them out in subtle ways, as Day Lewis does.

The really impressive aspect of Day Lewis’ Plainview however is the voice and manner of speaking.  Not even close to Day Lewis’ actual voice — there’s only one moment in the entire movie when he sounds like himself and that’s when he shouts at one point.  Otherwise, the voice conveys in its raspy rhythms a smooth operator and a hint of unpleasantness, danger, threat. 

I don’t know if any of this detail was on the page in the script or evolved from Day Lewis and/or discussions with the director/writer.  But for me as a writer, it is a reminder of the use of detail to create a fully-dimensional character on the page, someone the reader can easily imagine.  Real people are a conglomeration of detail in movement, appearance, speech and behavior and fictional characters need to be also.  Which doesn’t mean it’s easy….

Language

In the April 2008 issue of The Atlantic Monthly , critic B.R. Myers, in his review, “Keeping a Civil Tongue,” of Ian Robinson’s book on the English language, Untied Kingdom, wrote “People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else.” 

My  first thought was “all right!  Finally someone writing about this, and especially how text messages, e-mails and disinterest have shredded a valuable reflection of our culture and made perfectly intelligent people appear stupid.”

My second thought was “oh, interesting way to look at a character, someone who may be extremely well educated but speaks like someone who isn’t.  That’s valuable in espionage, as is a talent for accents.  But what kind of a person doesn’t care about language?  It’s how people communicate.  Wouldn’t a person want to be understood?  Or maybe not….” 

Not exactly what Myers had in mind, my responses.  Ian Robinson is a critic of language and Myers was reviewing Robinson’s book, so he ranged over cultural influences such as advertising, morality, style and usage, and how language reflects (or not) a society’s belief system and/or tolerance for others, specifically regarding religion because Robinson approaches the subject from a conservative Christian point of view.  To read the entire review, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200804/myers-robinson.   Myers has a slight curmudgeonly tone and a sharp eye for the ridiculous or brilliant.  I enjoy reading his reviews.

Back to language.  Writers need to concern themselves with language on two levels.  First, the way they use it to write and tell their stories, their style and sensibility, their voice, and clarity.  Second, how they use it to reveal character, create suspense, execute transitions, etc. I tend to think more about the second than the first until I begin the revising process.  And when I think of character, I think of how a character speaks – vocabulary, rhythm, accent — and thinks.  Creating a character with a unique voice is one of the hardest things to do in writing fiction.

A multitude of voices surround us on a daily basis.  Most people tend to tune them out (I think, but do they?), but I am a shameless eavesdropper.  Not for the content of what is said so much as for the speech patterns and use of words.  I listen everywhere.  This is research of a different kind that requires me to go out in the world among people.  On any given day downtown, I can hear Chinese or Spanish or some other foreign language (recently an African language that wasn’t Swahili but I don’t know what it was, and the rhythm of it reminded me of Bartok’s music), English spoken in a variety of ways depending on the ethnicity of the speaker or education level or region of origin or age, and highly creative expressions and uses of words.  This research informs my writing and my character creation. 

Coupled with speech is the behavior that accompanies it.  Also the behavior that accompanies silence.  Body language can say one thing while the words spoken communicate something else.  So, for me, language also includes behavior to a certain extent, especially in terms of its consistency with what is said, or its inconsistency. 

The example that pops into my head is Marlon Brando’s brilliant evocation of Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather.  (I gain much inspiration and learn from really good actors.)  Don Vito was an older man in this movie, powerful, and protective.  How he spoke reflected his origins as well as his age and his education.  He is not a man of sudden moves either, so his speech is neither fast nor loud.  The viewer sees immediately in how he moves, his gestures, that he’s powerful but older and his speech is consistent with that.  Contrast Don Vito with Michael and Sonny.  Sonny’s recklessness, especially, is reflected in his quick and facile physical movements and speech patterns. 

So, reading B. R. Myers’ review triggered thoughts on language in a different direction for me than the review took.  I also thought about how much profanity is used everywhere now, and how that can reflect on the speaker’s concern for clear, communicative language vs. bursts of emotional rant.  Another kind of character….

These Things Happen — Writing Update

Life concerns continue to prevent me from writing on the novel again this month.  These things happen.  I suppose I was idiotically optimistic to think that life would step back when I wanted it to do so.  So, although I’m on a “leave of absence” from work on Perceval in Love I continue to write notes — most recently about the fifth book in the series and the climax of that book (and the whole series) — and keep up with journal writing, and trying to catch up with some reading. 

Writing in a journal daily serves many purposes in my writing life.  It is where I collect the raw material for my writing — raw material from life — as well as work through problems with whatever project I’m currently writing.  And I challenge myself, review the day, think on paper, try to understand the world and people.  I have been writing a journal since I was eleven, after reading The Diary of Anne Frank.

One of my recent journal writing topics has been how to write about the life experiences I’ve been having the last two months.  Fiction or nonfiction?  Short story or essay?  I am leaning toward the personal essay form, perhaps structuring it like a musical rondo.  I already have the title: “The Itch.”  I’m thinking of titling each short section of the essay, also. 

I may not be working on the novel but I cannot not write…..