The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: music

  • Covers

    Johnny Cash covers NIN. Hurt is the best cover of the last 20 years.
    Johnny Cash covers NIN. Hurt is the best cover of the last 20 years.

    There’s a tradition in rock music of learning your favorite songs note for note and then playing them for money in a bar band. Freebird. Smoke on the Water. Johnny B. Goode. I learned ‘em all. Smoke was the one I liked playing best and these were the tip of the iceberg for me as a bass player learning my instrument. I loved Sting, Geddy Lee, Chris Squire, Paul McCartney and I tried to learn from all of them and more.

    I learned a lot of songs. All the ‘standards’ of rock music. I got pretty good at playing the bass guitar in a number of different styles. I wasn’t on par with any of my heroes, but I was okay. Later, after years of playing I wrote songs and my bands played them. We even played them in popular venues alongside the covers. One band did a whole set of covers at an open mic night, closing with Werewolves of London much to the amusement and consternation of the hipsters in the audience. That was fun but it didn’t win us any fans. Didn’t matter.

    As a writer of prose, that kind of ‘covering’ of someone else’s material is called plagiarism. It’s frowned upon.

    So where do writers get the same kind of training and trials by fire as musicians?

    Fan fiction is a start. And that got me wondering if there were professional ‘covers’ like Rob Zombie doing We’re an American Band or Johnny Cash doing Hurt and making it his own?

    Stephen King covered himself by approaching the same story as himself and as his alter ego, Richard Bachman. (I preferred the Bachman story, by the way.) And retellings of origin stories are commonplace in comic books. Marvel Comics even relaunched their entire universe as Ultimates which spawned their current slate of very, very popular films. Essentially these are ‘covers’. So are remakes of films.

    But the writer of prose doesn’t get to do this. Why? Wouldn’t it be interesting, say, to have an entire collection of short stories where various writers retell selected short stories of Ray Bradbury?

    Probably not. See I think readers are more protective of their prose than any other artist or creator. Well maybe not as protective as the fine art world where those who ‘cover’ a painting are called forgers. Anyway, you see the point?

    It’s impossible for writers of prose to learn in the same way that rock musicians do, except for fan fiction. Maybe. Can you think of a popular example in fan fiction?

    How about Fifty Shades of Grey? Fan fiction cover. Completely.

    There’s no begrudging here, there’s no sour grapes over any of this. I’m asking questions, looking for answers. I’m talking about the differences between the arts. Comedians are allowed impressions, actors channel other actors who’ve played the role before but writers aren’t supposed to cover stories that have inspired them. At least not in public.

    Is that fair?

    No, it isn’t. But that’s part of what makes writing so much fun, the challenges that we have to overcome to tell the story we want to tell.

  • Music Review: SUPERMEGAFANTASTIC

    This summer was the opposite of hectic, in that nothing big went on — but emotionally, it was busy. As such, I didn’t do a ton of writing. I would start something new, then the excitement (or catharsis) would fizzle and I’d find myself disinterested again. What I did was listen to a lot of music. I rekindled my love affair with owning CDs and whole albums. Music is a fairly big part of the way I write, and as much as I love The Glitch Mob, it’s not right for every situation.

    With that in mind, let’s talk about IAMDYNAMITE. Specifically, the album SUPERMEGAFANTASTIC. (Can I just say that the all caps names just make my day every time?)

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  • Dancing and Feeling Good About Publishing

    "The politics of moving, aha - If this message's understood..."
    “The politics of moving, aha – If this message’s understood…”

    Recently I sent my novel to a publisher for consideration. I try not to think about it too much but I’ve got my fingers metaphorically crossed they’ll accept it. The key is to keep expectations low.

    However, I can’t not think about the future. It’s sort of what I do.

    To do that, I think about the past and what I thought the future would be. At some point I (and a lot of others) thought sure that the future would be filled with chrome and jetpacks and flying cars. Even silly things like The Jetsons gave us ideas, like video phones and the three-day work week.

    In every version of The Future, there were things that were a lot the same as they were then, or now, if you prefer. There’s always food, almost always entertainment of some sort and always relationships. There are always corporations, too.

    Since I’m a writer, the particular corporations I’m interested in today are the ones that publish stories, entertainments. Like the one I sent my novel to.

    In the last thirty years, entertainment has changed dramatically. Gone are the 12”, 33 1/3 Long Playing records of my youth in favor first of cassettes, then CDs and now digital formats like MP3. Gone are the four networks and their summer rerun schedules in favor of first VHS, then DVD and now cloud-based streaming on smaller screens. Not gone, but certainly less prevalent are the bound books made of paper that are migrating to a computer cloud where one can read but doesn’t necessarily own anything any more despite paying for the privilege.

    Books in particular come in multiple formats: paper, audio, digital. Some are from major publishers, some from smaller presses and a great many more are self-published. (more…)

  • Commercial Breaks and Soundtracks

    It’s all music and television for me. Though not together. That’s just silly.

    I’m really into television as a medium. I will marathon a television show just so I can watch a whole story unfold at once; it’s the closest we get to novels in a visual format, if novels had filler episodes. (It’s not a perfect metaphor.) And while I have no interest in ever writing for television, I certainly I think that episodic format influences how I craft and manage scenes within a story.

    First there’s the matter of formatting. I will structure a story in scenes, sometimes on the short side, to set up for one relatively long climactic scene. I will set scenes that end in abrupt points, and jump into another scene as necessary to make sure the story is told as I want to reader to experience it — I can’t imagine telling a story without the best characters on the keyboard: ***. This scene’s over? Eff it — put in a commercial break and get on to the next one. I assume that’s normal, but honestly? I’ve never really paid attention to the way scenes are structured while reading. If I did, something is probably going wrong within the story.

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  • All That Surrounds Me

    All sorts of things have triggered something in my head and gotten the idea rolling, then the idea takes hold and I go along and start working it out as I mentioned here. But what kinds of things trigger that moment of inspiration? I’m glad you asked because I was going to if you didn’t. Wait a second…

    Tune in next week for more X! Minus! One!

    Anyway, I’m a huge fan of Old Time Radio. Especially the fantasy/horror shows like The Shadow, Lights Out, Suspense, Inner Sanctum and the list goes on and on. Science fiction shows like X-Minus One are in regular rotation on the iPod. You can find tons of these shows on the Internet Archive site. But the reason these things affect me so much is that they’re so earnest, so in the moment and flying by the seat of their pants and on a tight schedule. In the case of X-Minus One the stories were direct adaptations of now-classic SF from the pulps that were on the newsstand that month.

    While I’m on the subject, I’m also a big fan of The Bob Edwards Show on satellite radio. I’ve got more ideas written down from listening to that show on a daily basis than almost any other interview-type program I’ve heard or watched. I keep a spiral bound notebook with me during the day and that’s what snatches of ideas and phrases go into. There are probably six or seven novels worth of ideas in there.

    Depeche Mode made an exceptional music video for the single Wrong. It’s a couple of years old now, but it’s a beautiful short story told inside a three and a half-minute song. Go watch it, I’ll wait.

    Now tell me you don’t wonder how that guy ended up in the car. Who did he piss off that badly that he ended up like that? I like to think that the video was a nod to the 2008 film The Dark Knight because this seems like the kind of thing the Joker might do. The other music video that really affected me was Mike + the Mechanics’ Silent Running. Remember it was the 80s and videos were being used rather heavily to promote films. Among my friends we kept wondering what the movie was that the song had come from. It wasn’t any kind of promo, though, it was just taking the art form of the storytelling video in a new direction that would culminate in the DM video 20+ years later.

    Gatewood's Olan Sun

    Visual art has a real effect on me, too. I’m a huge fan of anything that combines words and pictures like comics, even Facebook memes and some abstract paintings from artists like William Gatewood. But then the fantasy paintings of Roger Dean and Frank Frazetta have inspired me to write stories to include the settings or scenes these fine commercial artists had in their heads and translated to canvas in vivid color. Even Russian propaganda posters (here’s a great gallery you can buy from if you like) can bring to mind a story possibility.

    I’ve been to local productions of stage plays that have caused me to start thinking. One in particular, Picasso at the Lapin Agile featuring Einstein (him again!) and Picasso on the very edge of possibly their greatest achievements. How could one not come out of that play inspired to explore the thoughts and ideas that are planted there? Same with Angels in America and so many other plays that are packed with capital ‘I’ Ideas.

    A writer is open to all forms of input, to everything that can spark an idea that will rub up against a thought and become Something Else. The only thing that holds one back from being a capital ‘W’ Writer is not being open to the things that will take him to the stories inside.

  • You Influence Me, You Really Influence Me

    Everything I see, everything I do, eat, touch, and hear influences my writing in some way.

    Television gives me an idea of what works and what doesn’t in character reactions and motivations. Sometimes If I can figure out within the first five minutes of a show who the murderer is, maybe something went wrong in the telling. Sometimes it’s more about recognizing patterns in a particular show. The same writers, the same characters, the same circumstances—in some shows that pattern gives away the murderer to someone who’s spent several seasons analyzing each episode. It doesn’t mean it’s a mistake, necessarily. But it is something for a writer to take away to either use or avoid in her own work.

    Movies, like TV, are for learning what works and doesn’t work. In this longer form, I can learn about the effective (and ineffective) use of tension and how it rises and falls to carry the story forward. I believe you can learn as much, if not more, from a bad movie as you can a good one.

    Food has to come into play, too. In my series, I have a closet monster who’s a gourmet chef. I am not a gourmet chef. This means I have to pay attention when we go out for a really good meal. A special New Year’s Eve menu we had at a local restaurant two years ago made its way into book two. The scene required a very fancy menu, and I still had the menu from New Year’s. I ate that meal myself. It was phenomenal. So I reused it on a dinner-cruise scene.

    Music is not so much about learning for me as it is about mood.

    I don’t think there’s a quicker way to influence a person’s mood than with music. Songs tend to be short, maybe three minutes long, and yet in the space of that time I can have all my worries lifted off my shoulders or be reduced to tears. It’s a kind of magic all on its own. When I write, I only play music without lyrics, since I need my own words to go on the page. But mood is everything. When I’m writing about Zoey, I often to listen to the Final Fantasy station on iTunes radio. When I write my djinn stories, I listen to music that sounds more like it’s for belly dancing.

    Art is for inspiration more than any other medium. I can stand in front of a painting of a woman in a chair for a half hour, wondering about her life, whether she was happy, if she had any pets or children or bad habits. After a day spent at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, my fingers itch. My eyes are unfocused and my thoughts are far away. All those paintings and sculptures swirl around in my head and form characters and scenes in faraway places.

    For a writer, everything is influential. It’s all or nothing. If we closed ourselves off from our surroundings, we wouldn’t have anything to write about.

  • Input/Output

    Just as writers get ideas from all around us, we also are influenced by everything we come into contact with. I dedicated a portion of my own personal blog entries to this phenomenon, which I affectionately call the Input/Output modes. Anything we take in inevitably affects what comes out.

    As a writer, I talk a lot about other writers and books that influence me, but sometimes I forget how much the other categories of art inspire me, as well.

    Music is a powerful one. When I listen to instrumental music, new worlds unfold inside my mind, and I envision scenes to fit with that music. When I was a kid, I used to lie in bed listening to my favorite movie soundtracks and make up new stories to go with them. Hell, I still do that sometimes. For some novels, I’ll create a Pandora station based around certain songs or bands for a certain mood. For others, I will pick one specific instrumental movie soundtrack and listen to it over and over, which shapes my story quite a bit, inspiring scenes I wouldn’t have otherwise fathomed.

    Visual arts – paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs – also trigger stories in me. I have always struggled with setting and description. I have a vague idea of what a person or place looks like, but the details are usually missing in my writing. Visual representations help me really consider the details.  Sometimes a picture will really speak to me and I’ll be driven to write a story that fits the scene. I’ll want to tell the story of how that domed city on the cliff came to be, or why the sky has inexplicable green miasma in it, or where that dragon got all of those books. Then characters will start to wander around inside the images to answer all of these questions for me.

    The arts aren’t the only other medium that influence my writing, however.

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  • Sing Me A Song, Mr. Writer Man

    When it comes to these blog entries, I feel like I spend a lot of time avoiding answering the question, or I at least take a boxer’s stick-and-move approach to the week’s topic.

    This time though, I’m going to answer it straight up . . . maybe. We’ll see how it goes.

    As far as non-literary sweet tooths go, I am a sucker for a good lyricist. If you can paint a vivid picture in just a few words and tell a damned good story in about four minutes or less, I’ll be a fan, regardless of whether or not you can carry a tune. That’s not to say I don’t love music. I absolutely do. But I think it’s okay to be in it for the words too.

    One guy who’s had my ear lately is Robert Earl Keen. He doesn’t have the greatest voice in the world, but the man can tell a story. He’s also funny when he wants to be, which gets you bonus points in my grade book. I’ve read that Keen writes a lot of his songs based on personal life experiences, and while I have no idea if this is true or not, the characters in his songs do have an authenticity that I admire and try to emulate in my own writing.

    Another trick of a good song writer is the illusion of shared experiences. If someone’s words can make you feel like you could have grown up in the same house with them, or at least on the same block, then you’ve just found a talented writer. Lyle Lovett does this to me over and over again. I grew up in rural Oklahoma, and I often recognize myself or my family in the songs he sings.

    One song of Lovett’s in particular describes the scene of a small boy out for a drive with his parents. He’s sitting in the front seat between his them, watching the countryside fly by, and there’s a cold can of beer in his dad’s lap “protected by only a small, thin brown paper sack.”

    Setting aside the legal no-no’s of this scene, I was that boy, and the moment I heard that line, I could picture it in my head. Lovett had me, and I was going to follow that song until to its end, no matter where it took me.

    I want to do that to my readers. If I can get them to believe they know me, that we are somehow alike, I believe that illusion of camaraderie might keep them reading as I stumble through the mechanics of what I’m trying to say. Nostalgia is a powerful thing, and people like to reminisce, even if it’s about things that are so very wrong.

     

  • Other Media Influences (Week of 27 February 2012)

    We’ve talked about our writing influences and heroes quite a bit here at the cafe. We do that because they’re important to us, they shape us and how we write. Being a confabulator of any kind means being the sum total of everything that one has read, watched, heard, touched and tasted. Have you read a passage about a meal that made you want to go out to eat? Are there songs that make you happy or sad for no apparent reason? Movies that make anxious to go home and write something?

    The team here this week is talking about the other media that inspires us or fires our imagination. When you take your seat at the Cafe this week and get that mocha in front of you, savor the heat of the milk, the aroma of the espresso, the sweetness of the chocolate on your tongue. We’ll tell you everything you’d ever want to know (and probably a little more) about how those things fit into our stories.

  • Close Enough for Rock & Roll

    Eastman & Laird
    One little self-published comic book was the beginning of a startling cultural phenomenon.

    I have self-published music, comics and my writing. I am not wealthy as a result of it, but I am better for having made the attempts. These attempts were made with the best of intentions but with little heed for what was actually wrong with each of them. We had no producer for the music and I had no editor for the comics or writing. I thought I knew what was wrong at the time with all of it, and I was right.  But there was more.

    Everyone’s heard the stories of the writer who pens a wildly successful book, the band who’s basement-recorded album hits the top of the charts, the writer and artist whose parody concept spawned a revolution in comics. Amanda Hocking. Collective Soul. Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird.

    These are the exceptions to the rule. These are the inspirations for people like me. (Well not Amanda Hocking in my case, sorry.) These are the cases that cause us to keep at it. If they can do it, so can I.

    I’ve been in a professional recording studio and in ones in the homes of other musicians, always looking to make the best product I could. One band was really successful at it though we didn’t do an actual release of the record. We got two songs played on local radio (one seemed to have a regular rotation for a month or so) and had some very, very good shows. Didn’t make a dime off the record, but hey we had the shows and the beer and nice following locally. I’ve documented my comics ‘career’ elsewhere and don’t need to rehash it other than to say that I got some positive reviews and made some great friends. My writing has also been self-published on my blog and via the wonderful folks over at The Penny Dreadful website.

    Each of these situations, projects – whatever you want to call them – creative efforts, would have greatly benefitted from a producer or editor to tell us what we weren’t able to discern for ourselves: they weren’t good enough.

    Everything that’s independently produced (art, music, writing, whatever) needs to have a professionally-trained, uninvolved set of eyes to give it a lookover. The Beatles had George Martin, early science fiction writers had John W. Campbell, comics have Karen Berger and Axel Alonso. Editors are important, make no mistake. (more…)