I came to guitar lessons late. So all those neural pathways hadn’t been opened when I was young and I had no latent muscle memory to draw on. But I have a very patient tutor who teaches me fingerstyle guitar. This means I learn pieces that play bass, harmony and melody all in the same shazam, so to speak.

He says if my guitar were a string quartet, the 3 bass strings would be the cello, the two middle strings would be a viola and a second violin, the top E would be the first violin (if I got that wrong, apologies to my tutor, he would would have got it right, I would have misheard).

What I’ve struggled with, is the musicality. I tune the guitar, follow the time, the beat, I play each crochet, quaver and hammer-on as its written on the page – but, it’s kind of staccato; accurate (occasionally) but soulless. Only recently have I learned to listen to the music, to its rhythm; to let the melody flow, drive time with the bass, harmonise the two. To play the piece rather than just the notes.

So, you can see where this is going…

I complete the first draft of my story and when I edit and rewrite, I do all those good things we know about: I tighten up the dialogue, weed out the passive voice, kill a few darlings, escort adverbs off the premises, simplify simplify simplify, polish until every sentence is a little smug sparkly pearl. And… yes, it’s nice writing but it can be kind of staccato and soulless too.

So now I go back and listen to the voice in my story, to its rhythm, and I try to put the musicality back in. I try to let it flow; let it sing. Play each note accurately, for sure, but remember they’re part of a whole, that they must flow from one to another, and not merely pop up in the correct order. In other words, and to flog this analogy one last time, to write the story rather than just the words.

Categories: Writerly Things

Tags: Writing