BOOKS AND MUSIC

There’s something magical about words and music—it’s why popular songs burrow into our minds and ears. It’s what we at the Word of South Festival of Literature and Music seek to tap into. Poetry has rhythm. Musical tracts tell a story. It all blends together, often into something profound, sublime or just odd.

Like maybe most authors, I listen to music when I write. Usually classical works, sometimes jazz—I find that pop or music with words tends to distract me, and I’m there to write. I go through phases that correspond loosely to the book: for The Gendarme I listened to a lot of dissonant 20th century stuff: Schoenberg, Stravinsky. I was big into Messiaen. For Boy With Wings, it was more 19th century romantic, Mahler and Brahms but also some jazz, Miles Davis, Mingus, Adderley, Coltrane.

This may sound somewhat strange, but sometimes I can hear the words on the page as I write them, as they seem to belong to some structure beyond the page. Maybe I’m to be faulted for this—I can’t really say. I saw somewhere that the writer Richard Ford reads every word of his novels aloud to his wife before he completes the work. I don’t do that, but to an extent I guess I do, as I listen to them bang around in my head as I read and revise, revise and read. Occasionally I’ll utter a phrase aloud that seems stilted or awkward.

Reworking it, I hear music, that gift that seems to arrive from beyond logic. Mixed with the beauty of language, to create between them something else. Something incredibly special. Until I look back on it later and think, “Who wrote this crap?”