#6 Cleopatra was a snowflake, and Paolo’s bass guitar
On creativity. A three-part musical interlude to retune the writerly creative spirit—via songstress Beth Neilsen-Chapman, pop pro Paolo Nutini, and operatic tenor Nicky Spence.
But first, since my last post on novel openings I attended a writing event at my local university where a senior lecturer is aiming to set up a writers’ network for the North East. There’s nothing to show for it yet, but a sandpit event connecting writers and publishers is planned for May, and at some point I hope to write a piece for a Northern-leaning website about the plans.
Now, down to business. I've been thinking about the inner workings of songwriters and asking: where should ideas come from? How do I get into my creative flow? And where does truth come into things? Simple newsletter-type stuff, then.
Signals from the subconscious
It begins in an unlikely place, in a music studio in 1997 where three songwriters were struggling with the knotty second verse of what would become Faith Hill’s hit single ‘This Kiss’. Noodling around, one of the writers Beth Nielsen Chapman spontaneously sang “Cleopatra was a snowflake” much to the amusement and dismissal of her co-writers. Chapman explains the moment in this excellent songwriting masterclass (around 14:00 onwards):
They were all laughing at me and went to get a sandwich or something. But I thought: it’s not Cleopatra, it’s something else. Why would I say ‘cleopatra was a snowflake’? Why would I say that? The song was trying to tell me something. And when they came back I said ‘here it is’.
And here is is:
Cinderella said to Snow White
How does love get so off-course?
All I wanted was a white knight
with a good heart, soft touch, fast horse.
A quick disclaimer at this point: I don't generally advocate taking literary advice from pop-song writers. A three-minute pop song is not a three-hundred-page novel. But the invaluable reminder in this anecdote is to listen to the signals from your subconscious. Forget the context and look at the content: that random phrase ‘Cleopatra was a snowflake’ parses syllable-for-syllable with ‘Cinderella said to Snow White’, not to mention the repeated ‘snow’.
Did her subconscious know something her conscious mind didn’t, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for her to find? She thinks so: “The creative spirit won’t be all that specific, it trusts you to work it out.” In fact, if she’d been the sort of writer who cared about looking stupid (even if only to herself) she would have shrugged it off and binned it. This is one mark of a writer: the willingness to be uninhibited during free writing or noodling, the guts to trust your gut. This is similar advice to writer Tania Hershman’s which, simply, is to “get out of your own way”. It’s advice which I need in particular, as I tend to write from my rational, analytical mind, and have (Chapman again) “one of those intellectual brains that wants to come along and name everything and fix everything”:
But you’ve got to get that part of your mind quieted down. Because the good stuff comes from the roots, from a place that’s not your brain. It comes from a tone or a wisp of something so deep in your soul, in your heart, in your memory, that you write a line like ‘she wore diamonds on the soles of her shoes’. Those kind of lines you don’t think up.
Agreed, this is surely how Paul Simon works. The bizarre, repeated lyrics to ‘I Know What I Know’ in particular sound like an AI hallucination (‘She said, “Don't I know you from the cinematographer's party?”/I said, “Who am I to blow against the wind?”’).
Chapman also has an interesting one-minute task to help find your “good stuff”—which “only works once” and which I’ll put at the bottom of this post if you want to try it. But for now: where should ideas come from? Simple: the subconscious.
Harnessing creativity
We can learn something else about the creative process from Paolo Nutini’s latest album Last Night in the Bittersweet: many of its songs were written on bass guitar. You can hear this most evidently in songs like ‘Radio’, ‘Shine a Light’ and ‘Acid Eyes’ where a good chunk of time is only low, pounding bass and Nutini’s high-register gravelly vocals.
On the face of it this is pointless pop trivia, but walk with me a moment. I find the bass an odd partner for composition. For one thing, you can only really play one note at a time. On a standard guitar, six is usual. On piano, I could play ten. The bass isn’t exactly Elton at the piano or Bowie on his clapped-out acoustic guitar. (And Nutini can play guitar, keys, drums, etc.) So, what is a pop-song writer doing on bass?
The answer is in that one note: the bass is minimalist. Its limitations place certain restrictions on the creative impulse. For example, for most of ‘Radio’ the bass simply steps up and down a tone from A to B: write a weak vocal or dodgy lyrics over that and you’re toast. And this is the point. Seven years in the making, the album is clearly more heartfelt, the writing more raw and the form more diverse than his previous work. Stripped of extraneous melody, sans frills, the bass becomes Nutini’s partner in introspection and a creative wingman insistent on finding honest truth. “Hey, I’ve got my new shoes on/and suddenly everything is right” this is not.
I also find that in general, the rhythm section is in no hurry; there’s nowhere it needs to go. The drums and bass could sit in the pocket for several minutes. This is how Nutini, through the natural inclination of the bass, has landed on the five-minute, the six-minute pop song (‘Shine a Light’ is 05:56)—a move both foolish and admirable as in the world of three-minute tunes it will have cost him considerable airplay.
What does this have to do with literature? True, in writing there is no menu of instruments to use, only pen and paper or a keyboard and screen. But, like Paolo, we can do two things. Firstly, recognise the conditions in which we feel most creative, specifically the most authentic sort of creativity which expresses something meaningful about us (which could be narrative non-fiction, haiku, short stories, whatever). And secondly, we can lean into the limitations and restrictions of that form to make the work more distinct and meaningful. That is, both finding the state of flow and guiding its course.
And there’s something more fundamental. In music, finding your unique sound, your voice, your form, your tone is everything. But in literature, it is too.
Where truth lives in the body
A final musical musing comes from my favourite radio show Add to Playlist on BBC Radio 4, an accessible, eclectic journey through music theory. In a recent episode, Nicky Spence, an ebullient Scottish operatic tenor, responded to a live vocal performance by the London Bulgarian Choir (from 03:30):
“There are so many similarities between opera singing and this kind of singing. Because it's so present. And what you were talking about with the glottis, the stop, I’m always thinking about subglottal pressure which is where you basically set up your body to make a big sound, and a sound which is completely anchored in truth and on your body and doesn't hurt your voice at all.”
As a non-singer, let alone a classically-trained one, the idea that vocal production can be “anchored in truth and on the body” is fascinating. I wonder how exhilarating and transcendent it would feel to sing in that way. How do you know when you are singing from a place of truth within the body?
A writer can't hope for something quite as present and immediate as this. But the task is not unfamiliar: to find a way of writing anchored in truth and on the body (as opposed to in the mind). How do you know when you are writing from a place of truth within the body? And, erm, out of interest, where would that be exactly, somewhere in the trachea?
Bonus: the one-off, one-minute creative task
This is a quick, fascinating task from Beth Neilsen-Chapman’s songwriting masterclass, intended to illuminate something meaningful to you. The task is simple. First, close your eyes. Let your mind’s eye go entirely black (something very easy for me, in particular). Then picture your own heart in front of you. Reach towards it. Visualise yourself gently reaching inside your heart. You pull something out, one thing. Visualise that thing in front of you. What is it? The chances are it’s something pretty meaningful and, if your aim is to create from a place of truth, it could be a good place to begin.