What’s the live version of your scene?
I write about music often in these posts because I love it (a close second to books in my world) and also because the experience of consuming it can be so different from the experience of consuming a book, and that helps me think in new ways about writing and reading. I’ve been lucky enough to attend three live shows in the last few weeks, and I’ve been thinking a lot about why live music is so magical.
Some of it is about the collective energy: the feedback loop of joy between performers and audience (captured so well in the book I edited this week!); the feeling you get at some shows that this song or this moment is what everyone in the room and on the stage has been waiting for. Some of it is about the quality of the sound: the way it envelops you fully and yet has room to absorb other sounds, of the humans and the city around you—the fire truck going down the street, the bartender’s cocktail shaker, a flirtatious conversation in the corner of the room.
But I think a lot of the magic is the opportunity for both performers and audience to hear a piece of music made new. The recorded version has been fixed—polished and perfected. As a listener, you stop hearing details after many times through—they get smoothed out into familiarity. A live version is a chance for performers to try something new: different instrumentation, a faster or slower tempo, a solo that has fresh energy. A live version is often something looser, less planned. It can take detours that surprise the performers as well as the audience.
Two moments in particular stand out to me in the performances I’ve seen over the last weeks. The first was watching Wilco’s guitarist, Nels Cline, windmill around with his long limbs, using his guitar and a series of synths and pedals to build up the end of “I’m the Man Who Loves You” into a glorious pile of distorted noise that he then whittled back into silence. The recorded version of the song ends in a similar way, but to see that chaos performed live, rather than layered on bit by bit in a studio, was like watching a skilled tightrope walker balance across a high line, feeling so sure of his mastery that you can relax into the performance, knowing he won’t fall.
The second was last night, when Kevin Morby asked that the house lights be brought up for the last song of the encore and sang “Beautiful Strangers” on a stage crowded with all of the performers from the evening. It’s a meditative protest song about gun violence, but also about living life without regrets, “full of love” and loving music: “They cannot scare us / Or stop the music / You got a sweet voice, child / Why don’t you use it?” A man to my right put his hand on his heart at that line and swayed rapturously. With the house lights up, the performers could see us and we could see one another just as well as we could see them. It created a mood of quiet, collective experience that somehow marked what we’ve all been through in the last two years and celebrated the joy of being together again in a room full of strangers, united by music. The song ends with a benediction—“Carry onward like some songbird, beautiful stranger”—that we carried out with us into a warm San Francisco night.
So how can we bring this back around to writing? Well, I’m here to tell you because I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. A question you could ask yourself, especially if you are feeling stale or stuck: What is the live version of this scene? If you stepped away from the page or screen, away from the words, with only the characters and situation in your memory, how would you rewrite it in a new way?
Two possible ways you might approach this question:
Like Nels Cline performing dissonance live on stage, what could you do in this scene that you’ve never done before? What would shatter reader expectations or your expectations? What rules have you always wanted to break? Want to hop into the head of every character in the scene? Do it. Want to adverb every verb? You have my permission.
Like Kevin Morby preparing to send a crowd out into the night, what mood do you want to create for the reader? What is the experience you want them to have while reading this scene? How do you want them to feel at the end of it? Thrilled or confused? Loved or valued? Now rewrite the scene with that feeling subtext in mind. Let it come through in your word choices, the placement of your paragraph breaks, and most especially in the opening and closing lines of the scene. You could even try rewriting the scene with a direct reader address—a “you” the reader can inhabit.
The point of this exercise is the experiment itself, not what you might get from it. Play with your work in ways that free you from the pressure of word counts or deadlines or even rules and return you to the sheer joy of storytelling and the music of words. Maybe you will find a perfect new line that makes it back into your manuscript. Maybe you will come away with a better understanding of a secondary character. Maybe you will remember why you started writing in the first place.
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