I’m always on the lookout for fresh illustrations and analogies that apply to the writing process. Here’s one I just heard last week where author Salman Rushdie compared writing symphony music with how he used to write which was a very structured approach where the story was planned out, and how he writes now which is discovering the story as he writes.
“With a symphony everything is written down in full notation. There it is— the musician just interpret that. With jazz, of course, there’s a general sense of the shape, but there’s an enormous amount of room for improvisation and play in the middle of that.”
—Salman Rushdie
MasterClass, “Determine How to Tell Your Story”
One is not better than the other, they’re just different. My wife is a classically trained pianist and marvels at how jazz musicians improvise, and I imagine jazz musicians (who don’t read music) marvel at how someone plays reading sheet music.
One of the thing that I point out repeatedly in my book Screenwriting with Brass Knuckles is how different writers work. Some need to know how their story is going to end before they start, while others (like Stephen King) say they’ll get to the ending when they get to the end. Aaron Sorkin says what he needs to get out of the gate is strong intentions and obstacles, and Quentin Tarantino says he just needs to know how to get to half-way part before starting.
How various writers handle plot, character, theme, structure, etc. is all over the place. Each having their own strengths and weaknesses. And to tease out Rushdie’s musical analogy you’re not just limited to classical and jazz music. In filmmaking you’ll find the equivalent of rap, country, folk, ragtime, rock, metal, blues, soul, techno, gospel, hip hop, grunge, alternative—well, you get the point.
There is talent and mystery involved in the execution of the creative process and sometimes we mistakenly think if we just apply a technique from an accomplished writer it will transfer to us. It can be humorous how we search for the secret ingredient. David Mamet smirked once when pushed once about his writing process and said, “You know how Hemingway wrote standing up? I write sitting down.”
But find what works for you—and you mainly do that by writing story after story.
P.S. This is a little out of my area, but here is a short list of great composers and jazz musicians complied looking at a few sites online.
- Classical Composers
- Ludwig van Beethoven
- Johann Sebastian Bach
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
- Johannes Brahms
- Richard Wagner
- Claude Debussy
- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
- Frédéric Chopin
- Joseph Hayden
- Antonio Vivaldi
- Jazz Musicians
- Miles Davis
- Louis Armstrong
- Duke Ellington
- John Coltrane
- Ella Fitzgerald
- Charlie Parker
- Billie Holiday
- Thelonious Monk
- Bill Evans
- Oscar Peterson
Screenwriting from Iowa 