With apologies to my students who will see this in another form . . .

Since the beginning of my fascination with writing I’ve felt a deep attraction to the sound of the text, whether prose or poetry. Certainly, the play of the words on the mind is achieved in many ways. The look of the text on the page is critical: the volleying of dialogue and description, the position and frequency of italicized words, the various ways dialogue may be expressed (in quotes, with leading dashes, as in Joyce, with no marks at all, as in Cormac McCarthy) — all these visual elements are part of the music the mind makes of the text as it’s read. This is to say nothing of the physical design and font used.

But the very basic idea of the sound of the text — as it is read aloud, alone by the author or before groups of people — is, to my mind, a huge part, not only of the compositional process (getting the words on the page), but also of the resultant quality.

So I was happy to find an interview with T. C. Boyle from a couple of years ago, in which he talks fairly extensively and well about the music of the text.

“The language, of course, is the most important part of my literary work. At least to my mind. I always work with music playing. The rhythm is very important to me. You know that I love to go out and perform my work to the public. I read each day to my poor, long suffering wife, just to hear how it sounds aloud, because the rhythm and the beauty of the language is the essential part of the artistry of making something beautiful.

“I don’t really care for genre writing, for the most part, because it sacrifices that sort of thing to just the plot itself. I think, for my money, I like art — literary art, that is — fully integrated, so that you have beautiful language and startling metaphors that seem natural, as well as a powerful story and a thematic level that makes you think and provokes you.”

Boyle holds, in other words, the standard for literary work pretty high. Which is where it should always be. Being an occasional genre writer, I rather like that he takes it to task this way, as being inferior to literary fiction. A work can, of course, overcome genre restrictions to become literary, but there are few models. In any case, I believe a writer is fully aware of when he is writing to plot and when he is writing literature.

“The writers I most admire seem to have a natural rhythm. Everybody’s is somewhat different, but I don’t know if everybody, even editors, are aware of how it has to sound.”

This is critical, and well said. There is only one person who can form the music, though many can hear it once it is formed. And that person is the writer, the composer, the artist. But the artist is not shielded from the world at large. He continues:

“You know, you can’t remove a given syllable from a sentence without it sounding flatfooted, and so you have to substitute another one. Again, it just seems natural to me. I don’t know how to explain it, except that it’s very musical and rhythmic and it has to be. And, again, that’s why I have never written anything without music playing in the background.”

Everyone’s different. I can’t abide noise when I’m writing, the more for me to hear the music of the language coming off the page. But the resulting music is probably the deepest if not most essential element in the text produced. I’ve been pondering these things quite a lot lately and with some excitement as my novel approaches publication, and I prepare for public readings of it.