Revisions and Late '80s Pop Ballads

I spent an entire academic year this past school term in an advanced fiction-writing course. It gave me all sorts of ideas for blog posts, some of which I will likely even get around to posting at some point.

But for now, I'm going to leave those be. I don't want to derail what could otherwise be a useful evening by railing about the use or lack thereof of advanced writing workshops, nor the quality of "criticism" found within them.

I simply want to meditate briefly on the value of, say, Michael Bolton, as an antidote to trying to incorporate revisions that are increasingly inane.


To be clear about a couple of things: I like revising immensely, even my own material. It's great to see ways in which a story or article can be improved with tweaks and changes--and they can always be improved; even the worst suggestions have some use. I also always listen to music while I write. Always. I adjust it for mood, tone, volume and so on. The specifics belong in another post.

When I revise, though, I find I need a particular kind of music and the kind of high-cheese love ballads so prevalent in 90s pop works well. It's not a genre I would often listen to while doing much of anything else. I've never listened to Bolton, Phil Collins or even the now-almost-corpse-like Backstreet Boys while writing. Wouldn't fly at all.

It may be that the less-preferred kind of music allows a certain distance. If I listen to really emotionally-moving orchestral music very passively while I write (which I do), then more active listening to very different kinds of music can get me thinking outside the story I'm working on. Especially when I've been close to a specific set of characters or events for awhile, this can be valuable.

In the case of this year's workshop revisions, the corny music had an added benefit: it shifted my focus off of the banal and badly-thought-out revision suggestions and onto something entirely else. In a sense, it distracted me. This helped me analyze each comment individually, accept some as experiments, and reject others. Everything seems to matter less when really super-sexy pop ballads are playing, and when I was less defensive I was better able to objectively evaluate what might work and what would not.

I've had enough musical exposure to appreciate any kind of music. When I write I listen to anything from Broadway soundtracks to country to surrealist music. Revising, and I'm looking to be entertained, pulled away a little bit, so that the work forces me back in. I don't mean this as a critique of 90s pop ballads (I'm somewhat partial to Dan Hill ever since I saw him perform with Stuart McLean on The Vinyl Cafe live). They have a time and a place and a use for me.

How else to deal with such gems as:

"Chapter is aimless. Consider turning this into a lyrical essay,"

and:

"Too much abstraction. People can't grasp what's going on. Use it as sprinkles."

Sprinkles! Finishing off with:

"Fiction is conventional and demands convention. This resists it."

Some of these might be semi-useful criticisms if argued and made with properly specific examples. Revising based on this, though, for a specific chapter in a long book, is not so easily done. It helps to sit back, close one's eyes, and listen to something like this or this. (If you don't line cheesy music, don't click those links.) One starts to think about specific ways in which "too much abstraction" could actually be tackled in a productive way.

Work-music doesn't always have to be perfect, or profound, or complex. It can just be nice to listen to. It serves a purpose, according to tastes.

Feel free to chime in with whatever works as "work-music" for you. But let's leave the "if you listen to X, you must like Y and write/look like/think like Z" judgments out of it.