Music and culture writer Ted Gioia talked on camera with David Perell of the podcast “How I Write” to talk about his life of reading and writing. I just watched it, and it’s marvelous.
Ted, who has been writing on Substack for three and a half years, shared the interview with a short excerpt about musicians getting inspiration from dreams. In the almost two-hour interview, he discusses becoming a well-read man over many years, reading books for content or style, chasing publishing trends, writing honestly for yourself first and then for readers, and how our worldview as well as social pressure presses us toward select kinds of inspiration.
It’s well worth your time. Many good thoughts were shared. You’ll note some that I didn’t, so feel free to comment on it here.
King Olaf discovers a young man’s “treachery,” a scene I use in The Baldur Game: Illustration for Heimskringla by Christian Krogh.
First of all, I need to correct myself. I’m a little surprised nobody has rebuked me on the point already in comments. No doubt that’s because our readers are highly sensitive and polite people.
In a previous post, I called the list I’m working on right now, for my upcoming novel, The Baldur Game, an index of characters. It’s not an index. It’s just a list. Every index starts as a list, and the process reminded me of indexing. But to be an index, my list would have to specify pages on which the names are found, and doing that would be just making work for myself. Writing a deathless epic is plenty to do already, without such excess exertion.
The really hard part of the character list is the name pronunciations. I discussed that challenge earlier too. How many different ways are there to pronounce Saga Age names? You can use the pronunciations the top scholars use – the ones recreated on the basis of known linguistic laws concerning vowel shifts and the softening of consonants (there’s a name for that, but I can’t recall it. And it hardly seems worth the effort to look it up, even on the internet. Grimm’s Law enters into it, I know – and yes, it’s the same Grimms you’ve heard of, the ones who collected fairy tales). But nobody understands those scholarly pronunciations. I’m inclined to think, in my cattier moments, that the scholars themselves just use them to intimidate us.
Then you can use contemporary Icelandic pronunciation. But I’d have to master Icelandic pronunciation to do that, and it would sound strange to my readers, who are English speakers by and large.
And you can use contemporary Norwegian pronunciation. That’s more or less what I do, as the possessor of a middling facility with Norwegian. But you can only go so far with that too. I can do no more than suggest characteristic Scandinavian diphthongs that don’t exist in English. I fear my attempts won’t entirely please my Norwegian friends and family. My relatives in Rogaland, for instance, pronounce the name Einar something like “AY-nar,” but I make it “EYE-nar,” like Kirk Douglas does in the Vikings movie. Because I don’t want to challenge my American readers’ patience too much. Not when I’m expecting them to plow through my prose too.
The bottom line is that I’m unsatisfied with my pronunciations – and if I changed them I’m pretty sure I’d still be unsatisfied.
It looks like there’ll be a small delay in getting the book finally published. One collaborator, whose contribution can’t be omitted, is being delayed due to multiple obligations.
Still, I have a few things left to do. I need to make some more Photoshop additions to my map – locations mentioned in the book.
I could do another read-through, of course, but my instincts tell me no. I’ll give it one more reading before it’s published, but I think that should be the last step. There comes a point when you’re just rearranging the furniture in a manuscript, changing words and then changing them back. I suspect Frank Herbert was thinking as an author when he inserted an invented quotation in Dune that said (as I recall it): “Arakis teaches the maxim of the knife, cutting off that which is incomplete and saying, ‘Now it is complete because it ends here.’”
Any work of man can be “improved” indefinitely. At some point you’ve just got to let the baby be born already.
King Olaf gives a sword to Sigvat the Skald. An incident I use in ‘The Baldur Game.’ Illustration for ‘Heimskgringla”: Christian Krogh.
Today was a good writing day. Yesterday was too, come to think of it. I finished up a side job on Monday, which opened up some time to exercise my muse beyond my routine two hours daily. And I was coming to the end of another draft of The Baldur Game.
This was the draft where I incorporated most (not all, but most) of the suggestions I got from my beta readers, one of whom is my co-blogger Phil. (Why are they called beta readers, anyway? Who are the alpha readers? No one ever explained that to me. And here I call myself an author.) I appreciate the comments and tweaks. They unquestionably improved the product and spared me numerous errors.
As one nears the finish line on a project, one often finds extra inner energy for the final sprint, which is what happened now. This is part of the final polish stage, and I feel things coming together. My next step, I think, is to construct my index of characters.
I like indexing. This was a surprise discovery for me. I recall looking at indexes in books I read as a kid, and thinking, “Somebody actually runs through these books and itemizes each item mentioned, and what page it’s found on. What an incredibly tedious task.”
But I took an indexing class in library school, and it turned out to be the most enjoyable class I had there. Indexing, it turned out, is perfect for my minor OCD nature. Approach it systematically, and when you’re finished you’ve got something neat and organized.
Character indexes are easier. I just go through the manuscript, note people’s names the first time they show up, and enter them in an alphabetized list, which is a breeze when you’re word processing. No need for page references. If you miss one the first time it appears, it’ll probably show up again. If not, he’s a pretty minor player, so who cares?
And once that task is done, there’s just the public domain map I plan to insert, to which I need to add some locations with Photoshop.
And then – I hope – one more quick read-through. And then I should be done, with only the cover to approve and the rigamarole of getting it published on Amazon left to do.
I do think this is a good book. In fact, I have an idea it’s a great book – but I also have an idea I’m biased on that score.
It is my custom, every May 17, to make some kind of mention of Norway’s Constitution Day, celebrated each year on this date. I’ve told the story of the holiday many times – this year I’ll restrict myself to saying that Norway celebrates its Constitution Day as its major national holiday because of a historical anomaly – we had a constitution for almost a century before we got independence. So Constitution Day became the traditional patriotic holiday.
The video above is rather nice – lots of natural beauty, in which Norway is excessively rich. If you’d like a translation of the lyrics, you can find it here.
The Syttende Mai present I received today was a good writing session. I actually gave myself the shivers reading the current draft of The Baldur Game. I suppose that’s insufferable, like comedians who laugh at their own jokes. But writing at my level offers few tangible rewards. And finding the same exhilaration in your own writing that you get from your favorite authors’ is as delicious as it is rare.
To make things even better, I had a thought today – not as common an occurrence as you might imagine. (G. B. Shaw once said that he’d made an international reputation by thinking once or twice a month.) I can’t remember what provoked the thought (perhaps it was the creative thrill I described above, but I’m not sure). But it suddenly appeared, fully formed in my head, and even after several hours I can find no fault with it. It goes like this:
No work of art is ever fully original, nor should it be. Art is a multimedia matrix of interactive themes and influences — all hyperlinked, in a sense. Taken all together, great art participates in an infinitely greater tapestry.
This is the week I turned back to the keyboard. Narration practice is on pause, because my readers’ critiques are in. Most of them relate to typos, but some have to do with plot elements. I’m working now, thanks to a good suggestion, on weaving a small plot thread into one section, which ought to improve… the tone, I guess. It’ll make an underused character stronger, and give them a way to help advance the story. (I can’t afford to pay my characters to just loaf around, chapter after chapter!)
I’m still getting up at 6:30 am to get my writing time in, though my body has instituted base countermeasures. In order to prevent me getting more than six (sometimes four) hours of sleep at night, it’s moved my natural wake-up time back to 5:00 a.m. I suppose I could get up and write then, but I have no doubt my body would then start waking me at 4:00, and it would just be a war of retreat by inches, until I became fully nocturnal.
I saw a clip of Jordan Peterson, who has, I understand, adopted a carnivore diet. He said he’s gotten good results against depression by telling his patients to eat a high-protein breakfast shortly after waking up in the morning. I’ve been putting breakfast off till I got back from the gym (gym comes after writing, that’s the schedule) at about 9:00. So I’ll try Peterson’s way now. This morning I had my breakfast sausage first thing instead of later. We’ll see how that goes.
Otherwise, I have a deadline coming up the first of May for the small magazine I’m editing, and I suspect it’s be a nail-biter getting it all done on time.
Right now, my hopes and dreams are focused on getting into May. I figure things will ease up in May.
Come to think of it, that’s what I said about April.
This happens to be the exact microphone I am using, a Blue Yeti, a gift from a friend. Photo credit Chris Yang, chrisyangchrisfilm. Unsplash license.
Landmark achieved. Another step climbed. Pardon me for talking myself up tonight, but I actually accomplished something that had daunted me, and I need to try to overcome my reflexive tendency to downplay it.
So this is the situation – I have “mastered” the Audacity recording application. Audacity is a free app that’s probably the most common one used by at-home voiceover artists and narrators. I’ve been wrestling with it for some time now. Has it been months? I’d have to look it up, which seems like a lot of trouble.
In any case, you need to understand my history with recording engineering. (I mentioned this the last time I gave you an update.) I went to radio broadcast school and hold a (entirely undeserved, and I null and void now, I think) Radiotelegraph Engineer’s license. But I always struggled with the technical stuff. Working with Audacity, is of course, very different from what I fumbled around with in radio back in the 1980s, but I find it equally challenging. Audacity (not really a complicated app) combines the challenges of radio with the challenges of digital technology. For a child of the analogue age, a “digital immigrant” as they call us, it was less than comfortable.
But – and this is what gives me a small amount of satisfaction – I went to work at it systematically. During my morning writing session each day (except that I skip Sundays) I would set up my recording space (like many home voice artists, I employ my closet) and worked at learning Audacity. I watched a lot of how-to videos on YouTube. I studied the instruction book I bought. And I practiced. Cautiously, and with trepidation.
I decided that, due to the considerable stress unfamiliar technology causes me (I actually woke up from a dream one night, my heart pounding), I needed to take it in small steps. I tackled one challenge at a time, researching and practicing one single operation, one skill, at a time. Once I’d gotten the new thing down, I stopped. The Voices in my Head called me lazy. Said I should do something more now, not waste time. But I had decided that sufficient unto the day was the stress of that one step.
I repeated this program day after day. Some days I got nothing done. I hadn’t yet solved the problem. But I figured I’d accumulated sufficient stress for the present.
And gradually, I figured stuff out. The last step stumped me for a couple days – the operation of cutting and pasting, to make corrections on a track already recorded. My instruction book was unclear, and so were several videos I viewed.
This morning I sat down and just played with the app. Viewed a new video, which helped a little. Finally, I tried something that worked. I had it. I’m not a master of Audacity by any means, but I understand the basic operations, I think, that I need.
Of course, now I’m going to drop it completely for a while. It’s time to get back to The Baldur Game, my work in progress. That’s part of the overall plan. Now that I’ve heard back from my beta readers, I need to evaluate their suggestions and get the book into final shape.
Then there’ll be the process of publishing the thing through Amazon, another technical challenge I’m uncomfortable with, but I imagine I can figure it out.
I do not lack things to occupy me, for the immediate future.
Something else happened today too. I was messing with another piece of new software, a publishing program I have to use for a side gig. And I figured something out on that too.
And I had another (fleeting) moment of satisfaction.
I then had an odd, unusual (for me) thought. I thought, “It’s kind of nice that I’m poor in my old age. If I were rich right now, I’d be vegetating, sitting on a lounge chair somewhere where it’s warm, letting my body run down. I know myself. I never move too far out of my comfort zone unless I’m forced to.”
Instead, in my 70s, I’m learning new stuff, expanding my skills. Keeping young (in a sense), in spite of myself.
God, the Author, seems to be at work plotting again. And plotting, as I’ve often said, means torturing your characters.
I imagine some of you are more interested in how my Work In Progress is coming along than in my flounderings in the unfamiliar waters of book narration. So I’ll tell you about that part of the business tonight.
The Baldur Game continues dormant for the moment. This is a good thing. Every writer (except for those wild geniuses who can solo on the first flight) has had the experience of getting a piece just as good as they believe they possibly can get it, and then they put it aside for one reason or another, and discover, on taking it up again, all kinds of howlers and barbarisms they’d never guessed at. It’s like the wallpaper in your house. After a while it goes invisible. Time away lets you see it with fresh eyes again, as if it were someone else’s work. And someone else’s work is infinitely easier to critique.
So I’ve got the book out right now for reading with three friends, whom I’ve instructed to be bloody, bold, and resolute. Give it to me straight. I may not be able to take it, but I’ll pretend I can. Act like a professional.
That’s what being a professional means, really.
One of the readers has already started offering suggestions, and some of them seem to me quite good. But following them up will mean thinking some things through, plot-wise. Plotting kills me. I’m not a plotter by nature. Four characters in The Baldur Game are noted as good chess players – Erling Skjalgsson (my hero, in case you’re new here), King Olaf of Norway, King Knut of Denmark, and Jarl Ulf of Denmark. I wonder how well I’ve portrayed those men, these good plotters. I’m told I don’t write women very well. I wonder if I write leaders well.
Then there’s the eternal problem of when to stop tinkering. There are writers, I’m told, who never get to the point where they think a work is good enough. There’s a character in Balzac’s Pére Goriot, if I remember correctly (I read it in college), who has been working on a novel for years, but has never gotten past the first sentence. He sits down to write each day, and immediately finds something wrong with that one sentence, and then spends his whole session revising it again. We know he’ll never complete the novel. His aspiration surpasses human capabilities.
I’m not like that, thank goodness. Eventually I do come to a point where I’m pretty sure that if I tinker with the thing any more, I’ll just spoil it.
It’s also possible I’m just lazy, and have thus failed to achieve my true potential.
Above, the King’s College Choir with what I must confess is the only Easter hymn I really like. And it’s not one that’s commonly sung in the churches of my own religious body.
And even this one, lovely as it (it shares a melody with the Christmas hymn, “Sing We Now of Christmas”), doesn’t entirely satisfy me. What Easter merits is a good, rousing, triumphal hymn, something on the lines of “A Mighty Fortress” or “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!” We do have triumphal Easter hymns – there’s “Up From the Grave He Arose!” and “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today!” But personally I find them kind of clunky. They don’t sing well, to my mind. I want one I can throw my head back and bellow, as I used to do at Christmas, before my singing voice gave out.
I should probably write a text myself, and see if somebody can come up with a melody.
Better yet would be if somebody wrote a rousing melody and I could put words to it.
It’s been 2,000 years. Somebody should have taken care of this by now.
Want a writing update? I’m not writing at all right now, in the strictest sense of the term. I’ve got my beta readers reading The Baldur Game, and I’m using the time for the necessary procedural stage of forgetting everything about it. So I can come back to it with my mental palate cleansed.
Therefore, I have turned to the business of book narration. Some generous friends have given me a decent microphone and other equipment, and I’ve carved out a makeshift studio space in my bedroom. I’m playing with the system – especially the Audacity recording software. I have a certain level of technophobia, not unusual, I suppose, in people of a certain age. Right now I’m just doing drills. Self-assigned exercises. The plan is that, once I’ve got The Baldur Game published, I can devote a chunk of time to getting The Year of the Warrior recorded, so I can release it on Audible. I was always considered a good copy reader when I was in radio. Maybe audio books will be my ticket to the big time.
Raymond Burr as Perry Mason, and Barbara Hale as Della Street, in Perry Mason.
Just yesterday I was talking to someone about recent reports that the most popular content on video streaming services is old, not new entertainment. This article from Screenrant lists 7 suggested reasons for this phenomenon. All of them may have validity, but I wonder if there might be one more – the fact that the older the show, the less woke it’s likely to be. The less likely it will be to try to stuff some fashionable new moral imperative down the viewer’s throat.
In my own case, I’ve been spending my evenings of late with Amazon Prime, working my way through the Perry Mason series (1957-1966). There’s some irony in this – next to Lawrence Welk, there was no show I hated more than Perry Mason when I was a kid. I found it dull – few fisticuffs or gunfights, and half the show was people blabbing in a courtroom. But my mother loved it. Today, there’s almost nothing on television I enjoy watching more than Perry Mason. I guess that means that – despite all appearances – I may have matured a little.
Something else that’s changed about me is that I’ve become a writer. Therefore, I watch for plot mechanisms. And I’ve noticed something – something that’s probably been obvious to more perceptive viewers for a long time.
I’ve figured out how to guess whodunnit in a lot of the episodes – not all of them, but many.
Watch for the superfluous character.
The thing to bear in mind is that – especially in television – especially in the old days – budgets were tight. The revision process in script development often involved finding ways to cut locations (if you can find a way to repeat shooting locations and sets you can save a lot of money) and cut characters (speaking actors are an expense. Make two characters into one whenever you can.)
So if you’re watching an episode of an old series like Perry Mason (or Murder She Wrote, or Columbo, etc.), and you notice a character who has lines (not a non-speaking extra) but seems to be there for no other reason than to make conversation, they’re not there by accident. If you can think of no other reason for the producers to pay them, they’re probably the murderer.
This goes double if the superfluous character is a familiar actor whom you’re used to seeing in bigger roles.
Written fiction is easier. You can deploy a cast of thousands at no additional cost.
I wracked the aging remnants of my brain tonight to think of something to post. Oh, how I’d like to be one of those writers who can turn up topics to riff off at the shortest notice. James Lileks writes 5 blog posts a week, plus several columns, at the least. I can only gape like the village idiot.
Anyway, I finally found the little clip above. It comes from the BBC, and a documentary done by the Icelandic/British scholar Magnus Magnusson in 1980. It’s about the famous story of King Canute (or Cnut, or Knut) and the tides. It’s often been remembered as an example of royal hubris, but Magnusson explains the context. In the original story, it was Canute’s (or Cnut’s, or Knut’s) purpose to teach humility to his courtiers, who’d been flattering him excessively.
I personally doubt the whole story, especially the part at the end where Canute (or Cnut, or… oh, forget it) gives up wearing a crown.
Canute plays a significant role in The Baldur Game, my work in progress, and the picture I get of him from the sagas doesn’t at all comport with a story like that. I actually tried to like Canute, since he was one of the most successful Vikings ever, and ruled England quite effectively by all accounts.
But the man was treacherous. Not somebody to turn your back on.
I hope that’s not too much of a spoiler for the book.
Have a good weekend, and leave the tides alone, unless you’re surfing.
