© September 23, 2020, Evelyn Pursley-Kopitzke |
For the last fourteen months, a red foil Dove Chocolate wrapper with a succinct proverb printed on the silver and white inside has been taped to my computer monitor’s frame. Its saying? “Be fearlessly authentic,” by Sotiria S. from New Jersey. (High five to Mars, Inc., for crediting the author!)
The advice has, of course, been helpful in the quest to apply my music writing skills to writing words. Before this jump-into-the-deep-end-and-hope-you-can-swim project, I’d already done a reasonable amount of [word] writing: a 75-page graduate thesis (plus its accompanying 20-minute symphony), too many long properly-cited vocabulary-to-wow-the-professor academic papers, word-count-limited grant application project descriptions, laudatory news articles about music organizations, obituaries for my parents—also laudatory, the yearly family fantasy masquerading as holiday news and greetings to far-flung friends and relatives, song lyrics, the occasional bit of “real” poetry, program notes for my music premieres, and my own increasingly complex cherry-picked-to-impress composer biography. (The more music you write, the more there is to write about.) So how does one achieve authentic? The answer, at least to me, was in the music.
Music, by its nature, is honest. I could no more lie via music than I could fly without an airplane. Joy, or sadness, or anger, or uncertainty always announce their presence, lending nuance to the simplest of intentional musical messages. So, perhaps my background in writing music has been helpful in writing truthful fiction. It has certainly contributed to the structure of my novels. Begin with an engaging motif; use variations on a theme; sprinkle the drama throughout the music; transitions are everything; escalate the tension; end with a bang—or a whimper. (Apologies to T. S. Elliot.) Telling the truth requires the bad with the good, just as dissonance intensifies the loveliness of the music around it.
Dissonance has its place. Think musical harmony that is made up of all major chords: the typical C, F, and G7 in popular music. Bubble-gum music exists. In its heyday, it was fun dance music, but its harmonic blandness made it all sound so similar it’s amazing we haven’t had a lot more plagiarism lawsuits. Adding a minor chord or well-placed dissonance suddenly transforms simple into profound. And the listener suddenly feels the tug of complex emotions.
Like music, fictional characters can create beauty in spite of an ugly backdrop. They can be happy within devastating circumstances. Sadness intrudes into their most joyous occasions. Both music and words can show urgency or leisure, turbulence or tranquility. Or they can simply propel the listener to dance or the reader to enter the story.
So, after decades of habitually writing carefully worded spin—only portraying everyone’s best characteristics—how do I write authentic fiction? How do I tell the truth within a total fabrication? (And yes, revealing my innermost truth still feels like jumping off a cliff—with no guarantee my parachute will open.) Music still gives the answer. Write the dissonance; juxtapose the beautiful beside the ugly. Not all perils are external; sometimes they’re an internal battle to do the right thing. And sometimes the character loses the battle. (It’s okay; the character isn’t me after all.) Flawed human beings—especially self-aware flawed humans—are much more interesting, much more honest, much more real.
Did I succeed in being authentic? Maybe.