Image: Melissa Etheridge in concert, August 3, 2024
Last week, Denise I and saw Melissa Etheridge and Jewel in concert at the Rose Music Center in the Heights in Huber Heights, Ohio. If you don't know, Huber Heights is a suburb of Dayton (which is a city a little more than an hour west of Columbus, (which is the capital of Ohio, (which is a flyover state in the USA))). It was a perfect night for an outdoor concert and a great show. Denise and I first saw Melissa Etheridge in concert in 1989 and we try to catch her shows whenever she comes through the area.
I have to admit that I have a certain ambivalence about musicians and songwriters. For full disclosure, I will own that I possess no musical talent of any kind. I don't sing, dance or play an instrument. I cannot even clap in time to the music. I blame this on the fact that my family was too poor to purchase the plastic recorder required for 4th grade music, so I never learned a thing. My parents thought I should just use my older brother's recorder, but he had stuck that thing in his mouth for a year, so I wasn't going to touch it. To prove my point about this being my musical downfall, Andy taught himself how to play a banjo when he was in college, so I think that recorder thing was important.
Music is a language I can listen too, but I certainly don't speak it.
My ambivalence has nothing to do with my lack of musical talent. It is a writing issue. I need 90,000 words to tell a story (my agent wishes I only needed 65,000!) and a good songwriter does it in 150 words. How do you set out a premise, create conflict, and find resolution--in a satisfying--way in only 150 words? It doesn't seem possible.
I would like to point out, there are no refrains or choruses in literature. I think repetition has a certain power. I think repetition has a certain power. (Writer's note: Did you get that? By repeating the phrase, i added import and emphasis to the meaning of the words. It's less jarring than just bolding them.) You just can't repeat the same thing, word for word, multiple times in long form narrative. I think that makes the job of being a novelist much harder. I will acknowledge that songwriters have to pair their words with music, but on some level that is just emotional manipulation. I can't force my readers to listen to a certain piece of music when they read my words (if I could it would be Bethoven's Ode to Joy every time.)
What is funny about how many words it takes to tell a story is that for the longest time, I struggled with long form narratives. It wasn't until I wrote my master's thesis (how is this for a title? Bitchery and Abomination: Being and Otherness in Light in August and Dracula) when I was 36 that I was able to break through the ten-thousand-word wall. If you want to understand how I could link an English horror novel written in 1899 and a 1932 novel about racially violence in the deep south, you just have to read it. Just the concept of the thesis should give you some idea of the power of my novels.
One advantage I will give novelists is that while a person can drink while they read, they are unlikely to get drunk and be obnoxious to other people and they will be much more likely to remember what they read the next morning. And have no hangover. And to those of you who would suggest that my storytelling is better when you are drunk, I will absolutely disagree. The typeface in my novels is much too small to make sense of when you are drunk. And if that is your point, well you can imagine my response.
Love: a story of grief and desire is now available as an audiobook! Available on amazon, audible.com and wherever audiobooks are sold.
Win a free Kindle edition of Love: a novel of grief and desire: I work with Reader's Favorite on the Kindle book giveaway. If you go to readersfavorite.com/book-giveaway you can sign up for the monthly giveaway. You can scroll through the list of giveaways (over 500 each month) or sort the list by title or author to find Love: a novel of grief and desire and put your name in for this month's drawing. Good luck!
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