NEWS: Writers and Musicians on Literature and Music

L.A. WEEKLY: It’s interesting that both Jonathan and Rick avoided the idea of influence and spoke instead of how music helped inspire the actual writing process. My suspicion has always been that music offers a unique fuel for writing because it can establish an emotional state with such an economy of means. Is music the ultimate Cliffs Notes version of emotional experience? Must writers inevitably be a bit jealous?

DARNIELLE: A good piece of music, however ornate, is essentially a primal experience. Sylvia Plath referred to her infant’s cry as “a handful of notes,” and numerous studies (I know, I know, “numerous studies,” but still) suggest that we respond to music even in utero. Once we’ve learned how to arrange notes or apprehend their arrangement, we get it both ways: something both intensely physical and entirely theoretical, the condition of music being greatly abstract in the end.

MOODY: What inspiration means is almost as complicated as the question of influence, in that the old use of the word — God breathing through you — is pretty hard to verify. When I was a young writer, I actually bought the idea that drinking while writing would help me feel open emotionally, and that’s one of the reasons that Garden State is a very bad book. Once I quit, it became kind of hard to find that place, the receptive place that makes compassion and intuition happen. I think you can get to the “inspired” place through non-musical means, if you are willing to. Yet music points to that topography effectively, and for me, as someone who is very passionate about music, this is invaluable in composition. But I do feel the same way about painting and sometimes photography. The museum can do exactly what we are trying to describe. Music, on the other hand, has specific formal properties that I do want to ape, because they lie outside of the ordinary sphere of things. For example, The Black Veil was built on ideas about structure elaborated by Miles Davis when he was talking about how some of the fusion albums were constructed. That is, I guess, inspiration of a sort.