Spinning characters

by Tamara Lee

In a recent Salon article, Farhad Manjoo reviews the new book by neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, This is your Brain on Music, which explores “the connection between memory and music.” The book addresses a phenomenon we’re all familiar with: the previously inexplicable obsession or passion we all have for certain kinds of music, particularly the music of our youth.

With this in mind, I began considering how just choosing music to write to can be a telling and occasionally anxious exercise. Knowing that the final decision will set the mood and the pace of a piece, flavouring the characters’ personalities, histories, and interconnectedness, means I need to get it right. My relationship with the characters, thus the story, depends upon it.

Since music affects my world like weather patterns, why wouldn’t it affect my writing, too? And why wouldn’t that affect character-building? Surely a story written whilst listening to sizzling Brazilian superstar Seu Jorge will have a decidedly different atmosphere than the same one written whilst listening to something more murky, say, The Clash.

If I choose to bypass listening to music entirely that writing day (a choice often reached with the help of my chronic indecision), I can sometimes fool myself into thinking I am writing with a clean slate, unaffected by a bad musical selection. But even if I’m not writing in the company of iTunes, when developing a character I tend to consider his or her musical preferences, whether it comes up in the story or not. Sometimes, I know, things needn’t be so complicated. But this is my process, and so far it’s worked for me. Usually.

I have this one character I’ve been messing with for some time, in possession of a nice well-rounded and eclectic musical education. I don’t usually let my characters evolve into pretentious artists, but this just sort of happened and it fit the story. Anyway, he’s a pianist who grew up listening to his mother’s Tin Pan Alley records, was high schooled on rock, and is now obsessed with the classical pianist Satie. A lot of classical music research time was expended on this character, in fact, but still I don’t know enough about classical music, and so the story sits. Perhaps the music research is yet another diversion for me, or maybe it’s just an excuse to buy (and write off for tax purposes) more music. Anyway, I can’t seem to finish the story, and I really like this character. It’s frustrating, actually.

Of course there are loads of things to consider when conducting a character sketch, music just seems to cover a lot of ground for me. A teenaged girl who loves country music has a lot of story and character-defining potential: she could have grown up listening to Patsy Cline, and so it reminds her of her working-class parents, or she could be a middle-class cheerleader who heard Johnny Cash the first time she had sex with the bad boy in town. So with the choice of one musical genre, I’ve covered: class, age, emotional tendencies and personal philosophy, among other traits. But then, maybe I just felt like listening to Johnny Cash that day.

At any rate, this tendency to compile musical tastes for a character is akin to the sort of character assessment I tend to make on people when I meet them. Not potential pals, mind you, but potential mates. If a friend likes the Barenaked Ladies (and not just as a guilty pleasure), I can overlook this poor judgement, as there’s plenty else to discuss between friends. But if there’s going to be anything between us romantically, there had better be some common ground in that music collection. In Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness, there’s a great scene where Nomi has this same experience with her future fella, sniffing the arse of potential love interest:

“And then we just started talking about music because that was sort of the test of potential. Even a Menno sheltered from the world knows not to stick her tongue into the mouth of a boy who owns an Air Supply record… Travis mentioned the name of Lou Reed without acting like a fawning dork about it and I knew then that I wanted to be his girlfriend…”

I mean, really, can you truly love someone whose musical tastes do not at least overlap with yours at some point? The same may apply to character building. Or does it?

I’ve never created a character whose musical tastes I completely despise, but that is a challenge I’d like to set for myself. Would he have to be a bad person or a lout, simply because his creator doesn’t like his musical preferences? Or could I really take the Pepsi-challenge and try to make him likeable in spite of his misguided musical tastes?

As I write this conclusion, the new tenants below are blaring their techno-annoyance music. The floorboards and walls are pumping with the rhythm of the bass. I’ve never been a big fan of techno music, so now I wonder what kind of stories I’d write while listening to music I hate. Not that I would want to put myself through that kind of hell, writing can be frustrating enough. It seems my writing future in this apartment will involve the regular use of headphones. Time to buy some new music.