As I mentioned yesterday in the post below this one, my husband just did a really fun music gig and a lot of it is on youtube. We have a friend visiting from the South and she sang a few songs with my husband. One of the songs they did was written by Victor’s friend, David Olney. David’s publicist just sent out his newsletter and included this link to Victor and Chelsea Nye singing his song, Where Do the Good Times Go?
Are you still with me (because I really do intend to get to the writing bit in just a second)? We hadn’t visited David’s myspace page recently, so we dropped by there just now and the audio file that plays automatically is a radio interview with Olney. Okay, here’s where I tie this into writing. The announcer asked him what advice he would give to songwriters just starting out and this is what he said: Learn other people’s songs. Serve a kind of apprenticeship where you learn other people’s songs…you can just sort of see how they go together and then when you’re ready to make your move, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
I looked at my husband and I said, “It’s exactly the same as the need to read when you’re a writer.”
And it truly is. If you read, you get a sense for how a novel is structured, put together. You might be a great writer, but a novel is a monster of a project if all you’ve ever written are fifty page papers for college or articles for the newspaper. I think people fear that by reading they will “lift” ideas from other writers, but the opposite is true. I mean, the more you read, the less likely you are to write something that’s already been done because you know it’s out there. The learning curve you get from reading novels in your genre is almost immeasurable. So…if you want to write music, take it from a pro…learn other people’s songs. And if you want to write novels, well…I won’t say I’m a pro, but I will say I’m experienced in this. Make sure you read.
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