One Note at a Time

When author Daniel José Older was still an aspiring novelist, writing stories in between shifts as an NYC paramedic, he hit a snag. He couldn’t make sense of his characters.

Until he listened to “Paranoid Android” by Radiohead.

In Electric Literature, he describes arriving at the song’s third movement:

“It’s a wild ride leading up to the calm — a bassline’s uneven steps over jangly acoustic guitars amidst sudden explosions of electric thrash — and it all intensifies, the scream of guitars rising to feverpitch alongside Thom Yorke’s haunting incoherent wail. And then the whole frantic, delicious mess lands on a long note and a quiet, mournful dirge picks up beneath it, harmonizing choral chants beneath a gentle strum. Yorke is pleading with someone to come away and hold him, an angel? From a great height? Who can tell? Who cares? The music builds entire cities of grief and beauty around the words… I asked myself: could words do that? Can the culmination of a story generate that same terrible love and haunting beauty that “Paranoid Android” achieves?”

How could it end any other way? Older, of course, answered yes.

And so can you, if you start to think of your stories like music, bursting along an axis—instead of unrolling as a single thread in a scroll, or as a mountain—as they build to carefully chosen arrival points.”

In a recent talk for Hippocampus magazine, musician and writer Lillie Gardner said arrival points are moments where the composers choose the emotions they want the audience to feel.  

“If you’re playing a Chopin nocturne, you know it’s a good thing when the audience cries. We want everyone to share this emotion together,” Gardner said. “If you can identify the emotion you’re going for, it would help me as a musician to know how to line up the phrasing to that point. Arrival points can clarify what else needs to be in our writing.”

Working backward from their arrival points, writers should chart their story along an axis comprised of balance and phrasing.

The X axis, the horizontal one, is phrasing. That’s where plot happens, where the story and the characters are both changing.

“In music, we’re growing louder, then we’re getting softer. In stories, our characters are changing, they’re becoming meaner and meaner, then becoming nice,” Gardner said.

But alongside those changes, writers should also think about what’s happening simultaneously along the Y axis, the vertical one, the one about balance, where conflict and contrast occur.

“In music, this is when you’re hearing five notes at the same time,” Gardner said. “If I throw a dart at a story, I might land on a moment where there’s conflict between a character and her grandma. And maybe there’s some interesting contrast in that scene, maybe we’re in a place where you wouldn’t expect that kind of a conversation. It’s a vertical experience.”

It can be a bit overwhelming, trying to plot your X axis—the story—toward your arrival points, while also filling in your Y axis with jangling guitars, choral chants, and angels.

But remember it’s the reader who hears the whole symphony at once. No matter how many instruments they employ, they were all composed one note at a time.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty, Gotham Writers Workshop