Songs vs. Novels

I started a novel a few years ago. Actually, I've been telling people for a few years that I started a novel a few years ago, so in all actuality I started a novel sometime when I was in college. Approximately 2002. If you've been reading this blog, then you know I have little experience with discipline and routine, so writing a novel was an interesting undertaking for me. It's not at all like writing songs. That is a process that somehow comes fairly naturally to me. I usually only spend about an hour on a song. The previous sentence is not entirely true. I usually spend about an hour actually writing the song, like putting the words on paper and setting it to music. I like songwriting because I can sit on an idea or a line or a chorus for a long time. And the same with the music. I can (what's the musical approximate for doodle?) play around on the guitar or piano or banjo or whatever for a long time and work up different riffs and chord progressions, without ever having to commit to a song. So in all reality, it takes me longer to write songs. I sat on this line - "He rode out of town on the most convincing horse around" - for like three or four years before I ever used it in a song (aptly titled "The Most Convincing Horse").

But herein lies the problem of novel writing. Even if songwriting involves keeping a few things in your head - a line, a chorus, a riff - those things should never add up to more than four minutes. Once you've hit four minutes, you should be able to put the song down. And in fact, if you have pieces of multiple songs in your head, you can mix and match - maybe riff A actually fits in song B better than in song A. Does this make songwriting sound easy? I might be exaggerating some - and I will agree that setting up the skeleton and fleshing out the body are two different processes - but the skeletal process is a pretty easy one. And if you're like me and long-range vision is not your forte than songwriting is the way to go. But writing a novel is entirely different. First off, for the most part you lose your interchangeable parts. You can change scenes around in within the novel or rearrange the timeline, but it would be strange to take a scene from one novel and place it in a different novel. Secondly, you have to keep the entire skeleton in your head - which runs a little longer than 4 minutes. Songs usually don't run more than 200 words, while novels (according to the perfect resource of Wikipedia) are classically any work over 40,000 words (although if you're working on one, it's apparently impossible to get your first one published if it's longer than 100,000 and you're best working under 80k. One hundred thousand words in typeset is 480 pages. Long.) And you're not working with music. This may seem like it would make a novel easier - and if you're tone deaf you can skip this part - but working within the confines of the rules of music should automatically give the writer rhythm - something that is vital to writing in any structure.

Am I boring you? I'm sure I'll bring this up again, so we can call this Part I or something. In the meantime, I will leave you with a dialogue between a writer and a neurosurgeon.

Surgeon: What do you do for a living?

Writer: I'm a writer.

Surgeon: What do you write?

Writer: Novels.

Surgeon: Oh! I've been thinking about writing a novel when I get some spare time!

Writer: That's so funny! I've been thinking about doing a little brain surgery in my spare time!

Obviously exaggerated. But I gotta give it to real writers. They work hard.