Or, How Flannery O'Connor and Paul McCartney are on the Same Page.
I began this blog last year during the first nationwide lockdown and I finally find myself, twenty months later, feverish with the coronavirus some sickly oik coughed into me. Tucked away behind my plague door while my family go about their business on the other side, eavesdropping upon them is like a window into a parallel world in which I've died and they don't miss me at all.
Having completed three days of my statutory ten days of isolation, I'm already boring myself. So I thought I'd bore you instead.
Last night, I finished watching the third episode of Get Back and was struck, once again, by a profound jealousy of musical performers. The artistic collusion. Their co-writing. A sharing of neurons. I know Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett authored Good Omens together, and several other novelists prop up James Patterson, but it's not the same. Ninety-nine percent of the time, writers cry at their desks alone. The only job more isolated is working the signal box at Mugby Junction (that's a deep cut, right there, for Dickens fans - you're welcome).
I was also gobsmacked at just how rapidly The Beatles' art came about. Leaving aside the subjective merits of the Let It Be album, the group essentially brainstormed two albums' worth of material, recorded one, broke up, got back together, and showcased their new single on the roof of the studio, all in twenty two days. After three weeks on a novel, many writers are lucky to have a paragraph.
It got me thinking. Notwithstanding the temporal and collaborative differences, are there parallels between novelists and musicians?
Watching Paul McCartney in that vast Twickenham studio, Ringo and George perched by the drums looking forlorn on their unhealthy existence of cigarettes and marmalade, two things occurred to me. Firstly, that McCartney was a far bigger talent than I'd ever allowed myself to consider and, secondly, he way he sang his way out of trouble was an echo of what Flannery O'Connor said about her own craft, namely, 'I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.'
You see, The Beatles had an impossible, self-imposed deadline, and no fully finished songs. Amid fallings-out, press rumours and questionable trousers, Paul sat down and started scat singing nonsense over his guitar. Two minutes later, what was obviously a loose, early imagining of what would become Get Back was being improvised, the other two had downed fags to join him on their own instruments and John, from nowhere, had snatched up his guitar to join in. Out of nothing, the song was born. Where once there was no Get Back, now there was a world in which Get Back very much existed.
Writers of all incarnations don't know what they're going to write until they've written it. Two years of hard graft and scalpelling to fashion something that just organically 'arrived' sounds ridiculous (and it is) but that's precisely what happens with novels. They take you on their own journey, and then get you lost and roughed up in the middle of bloody nowhere.
The same principle is there with music, though it doesn't always take so long. False starts, rewrites, crippling doubts. Ultimately, all art's like that. But a three-minute pop song with lyrics that read 'Sweet Loretta Martin thought she was a woman, but she was another man,' can't really compare with 90,000 words of dense, minutely pored-over prose, can it?
I think it can, but then I told you at the start I was feverish.
Flannery's quote has so much power because it reveals a truth about the creation myth that's hard to hear sometimes. You do have to sweat the work out, and it won't come until you're prepared to let it (be).
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