Unfortunately, my guest post on Fiona Kernaghan’s lovely site about magic realism, Create An Enchanted Life, is no longer available. It deals with how my past methods as a composer have (un)consciously influenced my writing habits.
My series, 1001, The Reincarnation Chronicles, is structured after The Thousand and One Nights. The series has a modern Scheherazade story set in the present, from which the characters recall and narrate their past life tales, just as Scheherazade told a part of a story every night to the King. Each chapter has a present day frame that transitions into the past life tale at some point. Again, the insane part is that the series contains 1001 chapters, with 1001 past life tales, just like the 1001 Nights. Oy, how to keep it all straight? Here’s one answer, an excerpt from the guest post:
“In the traditional Broadway musical, the basic unit is the scene-to-song. If you don’t like musicals, this is the form where people are talking and then some idiot breaks into song. For the Broadway lover, this form can be as complicated as a Sondheim show, where the characters elegantly glide between spoken scene bits and the next verses of the song. Either way, the scene sets up the information for the drama, and the song creates the turning point of the character, that main action thing again. I learned from teaching this form that you find it everywhere: recitatives leading to arias in opera, pantomimes leading to pas de deux in ballet. I analyzed dozens of scene-to-song numbers for my students, critiqued hundreds of them in our workshops, and tried to expand and improve on them in my own works.
“Another decade later, after composing a half dozen musicals and operas, including the promising Rock and Roy, based on the double life of Rock Hudson, I switched gears. I remembered an old idea for a novel, decided to take a stab, and fell in love with The Thousand and One Nights and my past life series. Facing the problem of not boring my readers with 1001 chapters using the same format, I played with possible variations: starting a chapter in the present, going to the past, then processing the past back in the present; starting with a mysterious tale from the past, coming back to the present to understand it; going back and forth between present and past so they informed each other; embedding a second tale inside the first and proceeding accordingly. There weren’t too many possible forms, but each had its own variations, and the form successfully moved the action forward.
“Just like in Oklahoma! OMG, I was re-cycling the scene-to-song in what I had thought was a neo-Arabic literary device. It was Score Doctor Stephen to the rescue, creating as much variety of this form in my novel. Looking back, I’m put in mind of that scene in the first Karate Kid film, where the master makes the kid with attitude wash his fence. Wax on, wax off, is the drill, using his two hands in the same repetitive way for hours. The kid’s pissed but does it, and then at the next sparring, the master gets the kid to make a karate move, and he sees that the wax on/wax off drill actually trained his muscles to do the move perfectly. Same deal, here: years of working in scene-to-song prepared me to structure and vary each chapter of my magnum opus. Did I do my musical theater work so I could write the series? Or was I unconsciously influenced by that work to re-invent it in my book? Whatever.”
Here’s another sample from the guest post, about another aspect of my musical life:
“I play piano for modern dance classes, which means that I must improvise everything, although within a fixed structure. Being a self-taught musician, accompanying for dance was my daily practice, my piano lessons, and my performing opportunity rolled into one. When Martha Graham says “And!” you play whatever’s in your head. You trust your first instinct, and build on whatever comes out. Being an organizer and a structurer from my other endeavors, dance exercised another part of my creative brain, and taught me to take whatever material you start with, and elaborate, energize, and make it work. To bring everyone to ecstasy.
“For my series, I have to come up with 1001 stories. I have a simple rule: any idea that pops into my head is welcomed and put into the series somewhere. There’s no time for picky judgment. Even if it’s a ‘mediocre’ idea, like a seven-inch plant squashed into a chunk of coal, I can use it somehow, elaborate, energize, and make it work. Hey, where did I learn that? That’s right, by improvising for dance I learned to improvise for fiction.”
So if I hadn’t waxed on and off, I wouldn’t have been able to handle a modern day Scheherazade. For more background on the 1001 series, please join The Maqaraqan (SEE FOOTER).
1001, guest post, The Maqaraqan, The Reincarnation Chronicles