98 Pounds and Sand in My Face

I’ve come to regard being tagged in a meme as being called out. These tasks seem to expose me as a ninety-eight pound weakling. However, when they come from a blogger you respect and admire, how do you say no?

A week ago Christine Swint at Mariacristina tagged me—

Think of THE song that most inspires you to write, whether it gives you an idea for a story, script or just puts you into a better frame of mind AND/OR peek into the lyrics and find a verse that sums up the theme of whatever project it is you’re working on. If possible, post a video of the song to convey to readers the full context of the song and the mood it puts you into. Finally, send the assignment to five other writers to do as well.

The trouble is—and here’s the 98 pound part—I don’t listen to music before or as I write.

When I was in MFA school, one of my teachers sent me a cassette entitled “Mess o’ Sentimentia.” His thinking was that these heart-friendly tunes might lend me the emotional heft he saw missing in my work. He wanted me to be more effusive. It didn’t really matter to him if I was more sad, angry, loving, giddy, or resentful, as long as it produced work that wasn’t fastidious.

Before you say it, I know he might have been right. Actually, hearing his plan did make me feel a little of one of the feelings above—I’ll leave you to guess which one.

Though I promised to listen, I was relieved when the cassette arrived and, through some error in dubbing, was entirely blank. The list of titles and accompanying hour and a half of silence seemed a condemned man’s reprieve. Though I’m normally the most dutiful student I know and debated and debated what to do, I finally decided not to alert him to the problem. My reasoning—it wasn’t a problem.

I do love music and listen a lot—when I paint, I have to hear music (The Clash, Dandy Warhols, The Shins, The Spinto Band, The Kooks, etc.), but what inspires me to write is other writing. I usually start by reading some poems or the newspaper or whatever I can find.

Podcasts are great too, as voice gives inspiring music to the words.

And I recognize how inspiring music can be for some writers. When one of my classes has a “silent conversation” and passes around sheets of papers that have one student’s questions and many students’ answers, I’ll put on soundtrack music.

My particular favorites are Road to Perdition (which is above, with pretty pictures by Thomas Newman),The Thin Red Line, The Long Engagement, and Finding Neverland. All are movies lapsed from contemporary interest. And most of my students haven’t heard the music.

Something about them, however, turns their faces to the page and starts their pens dancing en pointe. The other day, someone said, “This music makes everything I write sound so important!”

I guess that’s the idea—to open up the aperture to self-expression, to get you believing you have something worth saying. We could all use soundtracks to give our lives direction and purpose—or at least make it seem so.

However, I also can’t resist saying music is only a start. Here I am being peevish again—I’d rather write something that works without accompaniment. I’d love, someday, to write something, anything, that creates its own music.

My five (they’ll hate me, and I suspect some of you don’t DO memes, so…sorry): Cole, red ravine, The Backstage Grumbler, cha no ma-ri, and little essays