Dave's Anatomy #9: My History as a Writer: Writing stories based on songs: "Purple Haze"

As a musician, I know a lot of songs. As a writer, I use them to create stories. Looking back, the creative evolution of these stories intrigues me. Writing a story based on a song, on the concept of song, entails more than simply taking  what is described in a song's lyrics and turning it into a narrative tale. Songs are poems of a sort and they create not merely narratives with the lyrics but also a group of creative associations that become springboards into unique plot sequences.

Looking at lyrics, I marvel at how they are so often creatively associative. An old Led Zeppelin song, "Rock and Roll," has the line, Been a long time since the book of love. I've pondered the exact meaning of that line a lot. Does it mean:  Been a long time since the book of love was written? Been a long time since I read the book of love? Been a long time since the Monotones released "Who Wrote the Book of Love" in 1957? What is the book of love? This is the richness of song lyrics. Or the line by Cat Stevens, in "Peace Train":  Peace train holy roller. Again, what does this mean? A holy roller is a derogatory name for a charismatic or Pentecostal Christian who might shout or, in some cases, roll on the floor in religious ecstasy. But what does that have to do with the Peace Train? And what is the Peace Train anyway?

Song lyrics are not as cut and dried as we think. Ideally, they get the human mind working in creative directions. They create associations. I followed the lead of some of the associations of song lyrics in my story "Purple Haze." I had used song titles for titles of stories before:  "Son of a Preacher Man," "Norwegian Wood," "Into White," and "Revolution." Most of these stories, however, took the song titles because my character, Sossity Chandler, sang the song at one point in the story. This one was different. It relied more on creative association.

Most people interpreted "Purple Haze," as a song is about an LSD trip (though this is disputable). It emerged as a hit in 1967 and remains an iconic song in rock and roll. Whether about drugs or not, it is about someone out of control and not able to function properly. This, I think, was the thing I took to make the basic plot of the story. Sossity falls in with people who turn out to be a gang that steals musical instruments. They want her guitar. They drug her and take her to an abandoned warehouse, steal her purse, and try to get her guitar (she has left it with a friend). She also finds a stolen guitar that belonged Jimi Hendrix

But Sossity is at least able to function and reason, despite being disoriented by the drugs they gave her. She finds a headset and puts in on, thinking it may provide focus to her mind. It is a track of Jimi Hendrix's first album. By letting the familiar songs focus her mind, Sossity is able to get out and get home. The police contact her, return her stolen purse, and tell her the gang has been caught.

Years, later, her nun friend Heather arranges a meeting with a

female member of the gang, who has been religiously converted and released from prison. She asks Sossity's pardon for what she did. When Sossity asks her who helped the police find them, she answers, "It was him." Sossity asks who. The woman says, "I think you know." Though she doesn't believe in ghosts, Sossity at least considers the possibility what she has been told is true.

Being confused (possibly by drugs), helpless, and fighting for control of one's senses are big parts of the song "Purple Haze." These elements suggested Sossity's drug-induced torpor. The iconic songs on the album Are You Experienced give her a focus and help her snap out of her own "purple haze." Stories of Hendrix supply additional content. Songs lead us down creative pathways. Any pathway has lots of possibilities. Songs are good for story ideas. More on this topic later.

My new book, Mother Hulda, a short, fast-moving sci-fi tale based on a story by the Brothers Grimm, is available. Pick up a Kindle copy. 

For more titles, checks out my Writer's Page.

And--amazement!--I found an archive copy of the story, even though the journal that printed it is no longer in operation.  Here it is, for your reading pleasure:  Purple Haze. 

More to come on using songs and music in stories.

Death of the Novel Part II

The Death of the Novel continues to be broadcast. We surveyed the outlines of the “movement” in the last blog, and I want to get a little more specific in this one. What leads people to say that novel is dead or dying? Why did John Barth write something like “The Literature of Exhaustion”? And why were several other critics around that time asserting that the novel had come to the end of the road?

Barth’s essay spends a lot of time talking about creativity. He focuses a great deal on the writing of Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentinian writer Barth admires and on his innovations as a writer. He appended a preface to the article and says that it is often misquoted, and I’ll agree with him to a degree. He is speculating on where the novel will go more than saying it is dead; and he confesses that he isn’t sure. His most direct move toward the subject is when he says that the novel may be at the end of its primacy as an art form:  that like the epic poem or the sonnet sequence, the novel may sink to a secondary place in literature and not be the most read or admired art form. It may “die” in this sense. Still, he does seem to think it is in decline and danger due to lack of creative paths for it to take.

 

Barth holds to a modern view of the novel, and this is part of his concern over the continued life and health of the novel.  Modernism held to a sort of sacrosanct view of the literary canon. There were certain novels that were “serious” literature and certain novels that were “popular” literature. Popular literature did not really matter. The line of novels that began with Pamela by Samuel Richard and included greats like Dickens, the Bronte sisters, Joyce and Kafka, and all the other names that cluster around what was called “great” literature as Barth saw it, was starting to dribble out.

Borges

Barth sees some hope in the work of Borges. It’s creative, quirky, surprising, and innovative but still operates within the grand tradition of novel writing. But, he asks, how many people like the Argentine novelist are writing? And who could be as creatively daring as Borges?

I will agree that Borges is remarkable. His story “The Garden of the Forking Paths,” is one of the most amazing stories I’ve read and one of my favorites; the same is true for “The Gospel of Mark.” They are dazzlingly creative. I would have never thought of either of them, and they are written to surprise and delight. Very few people (certainly not I) could write stories as innovative and brilliant as these. This is the source of some of Barthes pessimism.

But is the grand tradition necessary? Does one have to write a certain way and create novels that carry on the tradition of Wuthering Heights or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? If the definition of what is a novel is restricted, there is not very much room to move around. You may be creative, but one can only imitate the "great" novels that went before your own. The canal gets more narrow and filled with more and more silt as time goes along. Not many will be able to craft a novel that will sail well in such circumstances.

So it is that the death of the novel seemed to loom. The idea of a grand tradition—the idea of “fine art” and “great novels,” as opposed to inferior popular literature limits the range of possibilities for new works of art. Hamlet lamented that virtue cannot “inoculate our old stock.” We think of vaccination when we use the world “inoculate.” Shakespeare (and his audience) would have thought about cattle breeding. To inoculate was to bring fresh, healthy, strong animals in to interbreed with a herd of animals that was becoming infertile from inbreeding. Barth seemed to think that the novel was dying out because it was to inbred, its possibilities almost exhausted, its creative resources growing thinner and thinner.

This could be the case—unless the old stock can be inoculated in the old sense of the word—unless new and healthier specimens can be brought in to restore life and vitality. More on this in the next blog.

Check out my newest short novel  ShadowCity, a paranormal story of a world that exists as a shadow of our own and the quest of three people to keep darkness from completely engulfing it.

Visit my Writer's Page for more choices, great reads, and innovative tales.

Creativity: Transcending Genre, The Book of Genesis

One of the most creative moves ever done is found 

in the first three chapters of the Book of Genesis.  

This post will not in any way argue the finer points of the narrative there, but try to show how the author creatively uses the story of how God made the universe to emphasize a theological point. Whatever you believe the Book of Genesis means, the strategy of the author in the first part of it is a brilliant, flashy creative move—in the story about the Earth’s creation.

Whether we’re religious or not, a Jew or Christian or something else, most people are familiar with the opening lines of the Bible:  “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” The simplicity and beauty of that line is well known, but there was a strategy behind it. It was not merely for the sake of simplicity.

The sole character in that first sentence is God. He created the heavens and the earth—the sky and the land. Period. That’s it. This is where the creativity comes on.

What creativity? The writer begins with something that would have been startling in that day and age. When he made the heavens and the earth, God didn’t have to fight anybody. He did it with no help and encountered no opposition. This stood in contradistinction with most of the other creation stories of the day.

Usually a deity had to fight to create the universe—or to get control of a pre-existing universe that had simply made itself by arising out of some primal chaos. Zeus and the Olympian gods had to fight the Titans, a race of older gods led by Kronos, to get sovereignty over the earth. Once he had killed or imprisoned them, he and his brothers, Poseidon and Hades, divided the spoils and set up their various realms. In Babylonian mythology, Apsu and Tiamat bring into being the Earth and everything connected with it. Soon, however, one of their children, Ea, rebels and eventually kills Apsu. Ea marries and fathers Marduk, the chief Babylonian god. Conflict seems to go along with making a world.

Apsu

Not for the God in the Hebrew scriptures. He doesn’t have to fight anyone. He doesn’t have children who will rise up against him. It’s an easy, smooth, motionless action to make a universe. It involves no conflict, no fighting. God has no rivals, no opponents. This implies, of course, the Hebrew belief that their God was in a class by himself, not one deity among many.

The author accomplishes this through a simple, straightforward text that charms by its eloquence. He does not boast about his (or her) God being more powerful than other deities. God makes heaven and the earth by speaking them into being. By the simplicity of his discourse, the author powerfully, and creatively, drives home his theological point.

The Book of Genesis was written probably around 4000 years ago. The techniques of creativity don’t change.