MusIc

One of the reasons I wanted to write Naked was that it took me back to the world of my youth, a world that shaped my life and made me what I am today. The main part of the story takes place in the long hot summer of 1976, the summer that saw the rise (and arguably the fall) of punk music. And that was my life when I was 16/17 years old - playing in a punk band. That was my world: the music, the people, the excitement, the chaos ... the dreams, the fears, the ever-present threat of animosity and violence. It wasn't a life that I necessarily enjoyed all the time, but it was mine, I lived it, and everything about it is still very much alive in me today.

As the late 70s crawled into the early 80s, I carried on playing in bands, but I began to realise that what I really loved about music was not so much the visceral thrill of playing live on stage but rather the intensely personal experience of writing and recording songs. So that's what I began to do. I still worked occasionally with other musicians, collaborating on all kinds of different projects, but by and large I spent most of my time writing and recording my own songs.

Again, it wasn't always a perfect life (far from it), and in terms of achieving my ambition - ie, making a living from music - it wasn't ultimately successful. But there's a lot more to life than 'making a living' and 'being successful', and if I had the choice now of going back in time and re-living those dream-fuelled days, even withthe certain knowledge that I still wouldn't achieve my ambition, I'd jump into that time-machine with no hesitation at all.

I not only loved writing and recording music, but I learned so much from it too. I learned about myself, about my attitude towards life, my place in the world. I learned how to express myself - my feelings, my confusions ... the things inside me that I didn't - and still don't - understand. And I also learned how to work with those feelings, how to let them out and play around with them, how to turn them into something else.

Back then, that 'something else' was music.

Today it's fiction.    

Music and fiction ...

There are, of course, lots of differences between the two - not just in the way they're created, but also in the way they're experienced - but there are also lots of underlying similarities, and for me, as both a writer and a reader/listener, music and fiction have always been fundamentally the same. They're all about feelings, emotions, life and death ... the world, ourselves, the things that make us love and hate. They're all about everything there is. But there are also more practical parallels between music and literature, and that's why my background in music has proved so useful to me as an author.

In particular, it taught me how to appreciate and understand not just the importance of melody, tone, structure, and rhythm, but the way in which these abstract elements can be used to evoke very real feelings.

Rhythm, for example, is just as vital - if not quite so obvious - in fiction as it is in music. The rhythm of a story is essential to the creation and development of all the various feelings and moods within the story, and although it might work on a slightly less conscious level than other aspects of the book, it's certainly no less effective. In fact, in lots of ways, it's the subconscious nature itself that allows rhythm in fiction to work so well. It does what it does without us being aware of it; and sometimes, I think, that's the best way to get things done.

So when I'm working on a novel, I'm always acutely aware of the rhythm (or more often the rhythms) of my writing: from the overall rhythm of the whole story, to the rhythm and pace of chapters and scenes, all the way down to the rhythm of sentences, clauses, and even individual words.

It's all music to me.

And, hopefully, if you read Naked, you'll hear the music too. And once you've heard it, just like a song, it can be whatever you want it to be, take you wherever you want to go, and let you feel however you want to feel.

coPied fRom:kEviN bRooKs