Robin Tompkins's Blog: Rob the Writer - Posts Tagged "music"

From time to time, I will blog about stuff that I do that works for me. I’m not qualified to tell people how to write and I wouldn’t presume to. This will just be stuff I pass on, in case it is of use to anyone.

So, the Sonic Bubble…

The world at large doesn’t have a volume control, I wish it did. It can be very hard to concentrate sometimes.

For a lot of people, the answer might be to wear headphones. That’s a good solution. It doesn’t work for me though. I am deaf in one ear and have tinnitus. I only get the sound from the left channel. With headphones on, it’s like listening to a hi-fi with a broken speaker, in a room full of starlings. Not helpful. I have to play music out in the room, that way I get balanced mono and the tinnitus fades into the background.

The idea though, headphones or not, is sound. You can’t control the external environment, so you create your own. The Sonic Bubble. Even if it doesn’t shut out the extraneous noises, it gives you a point of focus. Concentrating on the music you have chosen, puts it into the foreground and helps to put the unwanted noise into the background.

I think I heard somewhere that Ian Rankin plays Tangerine Dream albums when he writes and that Steven King plays rock music… very loudly. Well, I’m not arguing with a master storyteller but that wouldn’t work for me. He probably has a laser like focus or something, for my feeble, powers of concentration, this would be a disaster. If someone is loudly yelling rock lyrics at me in a language I understand, I will start typing them as dialogue…

For me, it has to be something engaging enough that I can focus on it but not so engaging that I can’t focus on my work.

Ambient music works for me. This is a quote from the sleeve notes of Brian Eno’s 1978 album Ambient one – Music for Airports….
“Ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think. It must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”

Eno’s Ambient works and Robert Fripp’s Soundscapes are my ‘go to’ thing. To change things up, I will sometimes listen to solo piano music, classical, or modern classical works like those of Ludovico Einaudi, Arvo Part, Phillip Glass or Phami Gow.

Here’s a little playlist of my current ‘trying to concentrate,’ favourites…

Mixing Colours – Brian Eno and Roger Eno
Equatorial Stars – Brian Eno and Robert Fripp
The Pearl – Brian Eno and Harold Budd
Thread – Theo Travis and Robert Fripp
At the End of Time – Robert Fripp
Ambient 2 Plateaux of Mirrors – Brian Eno and Harold Budd
Ambient 1 Music for Airports – Brian Eno

What works for you could be something completely different. Why not experiment and find out?
Maybe you already do this? Anyway, I hope that this was useful to somebody, somewhere.

So, I have been thinking about what I wrote in my previous post. ‘My Writer Brain, or, ‘Here Kitty, Kitty…’ To save you going back to check it out, it was about the idea that stories feel like they are in some way, already there, like an artifact waiting to be dug out of the ground.

I decided that that was something I related to, that it felt right. Adding to that, I said that if it was like archaeology, then there was that moment when you just catch site of the corner of the artifact sticking out of the ground, when you say to yourself, ‘it’s worth digging here.’

I then asked, ‘where does that first inkling come from?’ Answer, my ‘Writer Brain. This whimsical, capricious and somewhat feline part of my consciousness, that is not really under my control. It sucks in real life and spits out fiction. You know, in its own time, when it thinks it will, if it can be bothered. Unless you try to ignore it, at which point it needs you to know what it needs you to know, now, right now!

So, where do the, ‘Sad Fishes,’ come in?

I was thinking that sometimes I do get an idea of what ‘Writer Brain,’ has been getting up to while I’m not looking. I wrote a story called ‘Sad Fishes.’ Haven’t read it? No, no, I would have been more surprised if you had. That’s OK, I’m used to it. 😊

Anyway, one day, out of nowhere, part of a song arrives in my head. Not an earworm from the radio, a new song, one I had somehow managed to write, without actively trying to. Now, I love music, I have wide musical tastes but I am not musical… My singing would clear a good-sized room faster than a fire alarm. I don’t write songs.

But here in my head was…

Sad fishes, sad fishes, they’re eating from dishes,
Sad fishes, sad fishes, they’re dining at sea.

The next day I had…

They eat off fine china, from a sunken cruise liner,
Sad fishes, sad fishes, they’re dining at sea.
Now the good Captain’s table, is for all that are able,
Sad fishes, sad fishes, they’re dining at sea.

I then realised, that I had to set to and work out what the song meant. Finish the song with my conscious mind, not, ‘Writer Brain.’ Once I did, I would know what the story was about and I could write it.

Well, I did and the story is in the ‘Omar,’ collection if you are curious about how it turned out.

Not the point of this blog piece though.

Where did ‘Writer Brain,’ find the ingredients for the song that led to me unearthing the story? That’s the point.

Well, I think I know… most of the time I don’t but this time, I think I do.

I had been listening quite a lot, in that way you do sometimes, to a particular album. It had become a temporary obsession.

The album was ‘Keep it Unreal,’ (the 10th anniversary re-issue) by famously fish obsessed DJ and Musician Mr Scruff. In particular, I now see three tracks in a new light… ‘Get a Move On,’ ‘Shanty Town,’ and ‘Fish.’

I do not pretend to understand the exact process, ‘Writer Brain,’ used to arrive at ‘Sad Fishes,’ but I am totally convinced that this is where it started from…