“I Want To Write About Music”
The thing about turning points is that they’re often hard to recognize in the moment. One minute you’re just stumbling along like usual, trying to keep the ball moving forward, the next you find that you’ve turned down a path whose end you cannot see. In March 1996, the editor of a new local start-up arts and entertainment magazine shot me an e-mail asking if I’d like to write for them. I answered his next question—“What do you want to write about?”—with no forethought, going on pure instinct and the truth I felt inside, much like the best of the...
Read MoreThe Soundtrack to Everything
When I sent the initial draft of Believe in Me out to a handful of early readers, I enclosed a CD containing the novel’s soundtrack, a set of 20 songs that complement the action and are referenced in the text. This was, I can assure you, perfectly normal behavior—at least, for someone who listens to music at every opportunity, and constantly experiences the world in relationship with and reference to lyrics and melodies and the indelible moments that have become attached to them in memory. To me, soundtracks aren’t just for movies. Soundtracks are for life. I’m not saying that...
Read MoreI Am Not A Critic
Of all the conversations I’ve had in recent weeks around the book I’ll be publishing early next year – My Heart Sings the Harmony: Twenty Years of Writing About Music – the single most challenging and revealing one has been about my visceral reaction to a label that many of my peers either quietly accept or willingly embrace. I am not a critic. Yes, I write about music. Yes, I assess the music against my personal tastes and historical body of knowledge, and offer an opinion about it. But I’ve never in my life aspired to the title of “music...
Read MoreSequel
Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. - John Lennon, “Beautiful Boy,” 1980. For quite a while now I’ve been certain that the next book I published would be a sequel to my debut novel Believe in Me. I just didn’t think it would be this sequel. It seems the powers that be—in the form of a certain A-list musical quintet that spent calendar year 2015 touring rather than responding to queries about lyric permissions, imagine that—have determined that the sequel I’ve had in mind will not be published this year. And in the meantime,...
Read MoreTravel = Fuel
It’s possible to write quality fiction without ever leaving your home turf—many notable authors have spent a chunk of their career writing about a single, specific region—but that doesn’t change the reality that, for a fiction writer, travel equals fuel. Whether you’re flying across the world or, as we recently did, taking a two-week road trip that never ranges more than 1000 miles from home, travel fires the imagination in a way that few other experiences can. First, travel disrupts your normal daily routines and requires you to be more flexible and adaptable—while at the same time, that sense of...
Read MoreLeave a Mark
Write what you know, they say. And that’s all well and good—my own personal history definitely helped me bring the musical and political elements of Believe in Me to life. But if you aspire to do more than just render interesting tidbits of fact in fictional form, you need to do more than just write about the things you’re familiar with. You have to write about the things that trigger your emotions, that provoke you somehow—the things you love or hate or fear or covet, that make you sad or angry or deliriously happy. The moments that leave a mark....
Read MoreThe Bookshelf Diaries (An Occasional Series): Peter Heller, Tom Rachman, Michael Connelly
Sometimes I go backward, sometimes forward. A nudge from Amazon a while back led me to investigate Peter Heller’s engrossing novel The Painter. Heller writes literary fiction, in the sense that his narratives are layered and philosophical and crafted with admirable elegance, but it’s literary fiction with a plot. The Painter is a story about a crusty middle-aged artist experiencing a transformational turning point in his life—and it’s also a thriller with murder, stalking, a fire, and an armed confrontation, among other notable plot points driving the story forward, making for a genuinely entertaining read that’s also full of sharp...
Read MoreHerding Cats
Inspiration is something you can’t force or predict; it comes when it comes. Given the frequent presence in my writing space of my own feline menagerie (population: 3), I can’t help but fall back on the phrase “it’s like herding cats.” Trying to corral your own creativity is exactly that futile. Inspiration will arrive when it’s good and ready, and not a moment sooner. It’s also fickle. There are many ways to clear your mind and make space for creativity. Many of them involve some form of relaxation—listening to music, gardening, taking a long drive, taking a nap. But getting...
Read MoreQuiet Hours
The thing about the quiet hours that spin out, sometimes feeling endless, between published work is that it only looks from the outside like nothing is happening. Even in the quietest (or busiest-doing-other-things) moments, the engine continues to churn somewhere deep inside. The imagination is never idle, whether it’s busy at a given time working a problem, like character or plot or organization of ideas, or lost in simple everyday fantasy. And the latter is usually the source of the best ideas, the moments when your imagination runs completely free, discovering connections that only become apparent when your conscious mind...
Read MoreParenthood: An Appreciation
On my way home from work last Thursday, the night the Parenthood series finale was broadcast, I noticed a bumper sticker on the slightly banged-up Toyota in front of me: “Life isn’t about avoiding the storms; it’s about learning to dance in the rain.” Every person’s life is both a comedy and a tragedy. Wonderful, absurd things happen. Terrible, soul-crushing things happen. And it’s up to us to figure out how to cope, and strive, and grow, and find the joy where we can. For six seasons Parenthood portrayed that struggle better than any show on television, in the context...
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