Greetings, writers—
The other day a friend asked me if I’d found my companion books for the novel I’m writing, and the answer is “not yet.”
As I wrote in an earlier post, a companion book is one you keep close at hand (for me this was in the upper left corner of my desk) while you’re working on your own story, and it earns its place there for any number of reasons—because it’s tonally resonant, it’s set in a similar place, it shares themes with your work, or you just flat-out love it and think it has something to teach you about the story you’re trying to write. It’s not a book you need for research; it’s not the book you just happen to be reading at the same time you’re writing your own. It’s a guide. A few hundred pages of inspiration. A height to aim for. 1
One of Edmund White’s novels was a companion book during the two years I spent writing Hello Goodbye. White, meanwhile, has “never willingly written a word without listening to music of some sort.” For him, a sonata is a companion. He writes:
Like fiction, music is an art that exists in time. Like fiction, music is always promising an imminent conclusion and then introducing complications. Like fiction, music can be plain to the point of plainsong or as intricate as counterpoint, and both extremes can be satisfying. Just as the novelist must keep all his strategies aloft and not allow the reader to forget a character or lose sight of the house, the ha-ha or the wilderness beyond, or skip over a crucial turn in the plot, in the same way the composer must teach the listener to recognize the key themes, the shifts in harmonic progression and the division of the composition into parts.
He also uses music to “program” his moods:
“a bit of ‘Wiener Blut’ to bring a smile to the lips, Stravinsky’s ‘Agon’ to introduce rigor into the composing process, Chopin’s Nocturnes to make me more introspective after a jarring conversation.”
In case it’s not obvious, White is an unabashed snob; he’s not listening to the Doors or Ed f*&$ing Sheeran. (Or Hooked on Classics, which my parents used to play when I was little and which I thought was really the greatest.)
But god love a snob to whom classical music matters so much and who can write a line as audacious as this: “Hajo [a rich lover] invited me once to Gstaad, but since I don’t ski and was in the throes of writing my best short story, ‘An Oracle,’ I shut myself away in the chalet and didn’t even attend Liz Taylor’s party.” I mean, come on—someone put me in a room with Edmund White and a pitcher of martinis this very instant.2
My point, though—and I’ve made it before; I’m making it again because it’s important—is that it really helps to have a friend when you’re writing, be it a book or a playlist3 or an actual person who you know will read your words and then say nice things to you.
Today, put on a favorite song (or sonata, or symphony, whatever) and answer—however you see fit—the question, “Why all this nonsense?”4
Or take something you’ve already written and, as White suggests, introduce new complications.
Happy writing—
Emily
P.S. Good Ideas will be on hiatus for a week or two. Paid subscriptions will be paused. 💙
I wish I had a companion book right now. Or two or three or five. But I can’t find one yet because what my book is (or wants to be?) keeps changing. I have 60,000 words’ worth of ideas for it, arranged only by the date they occurred to me, called “the divorced notes.” But there’s not a single divorce in the draft as it’s written now, and nor is there likely to be one. In other words, when I started that file I was writing a completely different novel.
Further reading indicates that White has been sober since 1982, which was probably the year I was grooving to Hooked on Classics, so I guess I’d have to drink all that gin myself.
I know someone (hi, KP!) who has two long playlists, and when she puts one on she writes steadily until it ends several hours later.
This is my extremely informal translation of a line from the aria Erbarme dich, mein Gott (from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion), which White says his misanthropic father liked to listen to.
Mine is Fredrik Backman's Anxious People. When I can't figure out how to start a new chapter, paragraph, sentence -- I find something to inspire me in this book. And it usually makes me laugh too.