Writing is Like Music
Why your writing should sing its own tune
I read a wonderful essay recently by Joe Oestreich entitled “Writing in the Major Key” and it got me thinking: Writing—creative nonfiction, fiction, and certainly poetry—is more like writing music than I had ever imagined. And I have imagined a lot.
I’m a musician. That’s a confession of sorts. Musicians are funny dudes. We like melody but we also like math, a little bit at least. Music is math. Quarter note sand half notes and time signatures. But music is also something much more because if it were all math, well, it would be awful music. It’s like if writing was all about grammar. Music, like good writing, is steeped in emotion. It is pathos and sensitivity and insight and reflection. But in the musician’s world you really only have two major categories of emotion—the major and the minor key.
In Oestreich’s essay he wonders whether he is a writer who should be writing in the major key or the minor key; he wonders if he can do both. Oestreich suggests that most publishers and literary journal editors are lovers of the minor key—stories with trouble, angst, sorrow, pain, suffering. Major key writers, he continues, don’t necessarily hold the same weight in the literary world even tough there is as much happiness, one would argue, as there is sadness in the world. Maybe more. I would…
