I make a big song and dance about how good stories can be found anywhere. Well, it's time to put my money where my mouth is and put my first ever music album under the magnifying glass. And what better way to start than with one of my favourite bands, Muse, and their conceptual album, Drones.
Music faces a unique challenge when it comes to telling a story, in that it's not the main purpose of the medium. Movies and books tell stories. Music is...well, what is music for? It's entertainment, sure, but isn't there more to it than that? For me, music serves to create or enhance a mood. Music can relax, excite, enrage, make you smile, make you cry. And it can do that even when you were feeling in a completely different mood prior to listening. It's also the only form of entertainment that doesn't require your complete attention: you can leave the music to play while you cook, exercise, chat or even sleep. So how do you match this format of entertainment with telling a story? It's a challenge, to be sure, hence why those “albums that tell a story” are rare compared to your straight-shooting one-track-at-time album. And even then, conceptual albums can be very hit or miss, often failing for not committing to its story enough or too much (when there's filler tracks to simply move the story along). Sure, you get songs that tell a whole story in one go (Eminem’s ‘Stan’ is a prime example), but sustaining the narrative across a dozen tracks is a very different beast. People rarely come to music for the story it tells: they come it for those reasons I mentioned earlier; for setting a mood or for background entertainment. So it’s a real challenge for the more narrative-inclined songwriters out there. There’s multiple methods and techniques out there, but for me there there’s two main points that a good story-based album need to demonstrate: the stealth story, and the feel of the story arc. And I feel that Muse’s Drones displays both expertly. Let’s cover the stealth story first. How many times have you been told that the song you’ve enjoyed listening to hundreds of times has an interesting story to it, and you never noticed it? Well, in a backwards kind of way, that's the ideal. You see, you don’t feel short-changed from your entertainment: you have been enjoying the music on a different level. If anything, sometimes knowing what the lyrics really mean can spoil the music for some. Not because the narrative is distasteful, but because you can’t not hear the story when you’ve first noticed it. People prefer their music to complement their lifestyle, as a form of escapism that doesn’t intrude, while stories push a specific agenda that demands attention and a certain thought process from the listener. That can put off listeners who just like their music to be something that makes their commute a little more enjoyable or something to unwind with at the end of the day. It’s why people understandably raise their hackles whenever an album strips away all the music for a bit of tuneless narration. A good story can enhance the music in the same way that a good soundtrack enhances a movie, but it should never overpower it. The story should be inserted stealthily, threaded seamlessly into the fabric of the sound. Lyrics are deliberately opaque, painting the underlying narrative in broad strokes without filling in the detail. If the lyrics explicitly spell out what is happening, it sticks out and can irritate those who simply wish to enjoy the music. Look to songs like Feel Good Inc. by Gorillaz, with lyrics and accompanying video signalling the dangers of excess and the loss of innocence, but you need not know that. You can take it on a surface level. This isn’t to say that listeners don’t wish to be challenged. Rather, they prefer to make up their own mind up about what the music means to them. That’s why the best concept albums are often interpreted in different ways: the meaning was never clearly laid out. We get a general feel for the themes and the vague direction the story takes, but the finer points are left to the audience to fill in - if they want to. Coming back to Muse’s Drones, I think all listeners can agree that the album has an anti-military, anti-authority stance, and there seems to be a character who falls into the system, becoming a drone, before breaking free of their oppressor. But beyond that, the detail of the story is unclear, at times contradictory. The band has said that the protagonist is female, yet there’s evidence in the album to the contrary, such as the male screams of ‘aye Sir!’ on Psycho. Psycho itself paints a picture of military-style mental abuse, but other songs like Mercy (and the accompanying video) allude to a more scientific theme of mind control. Some have said that this is a downside, that the concept is unclear. On the contrary, this is the greatest sign of a story that’s been stealthily inserted into the music: it’s up for interpretation. After listening to Drones from beginning to end we all get a rough sense of the story told, while having individual elbow room to fill in the blanks. Personally, I latch onto the opening lines in Mercy, where we have lines like: “I tried to change the game/I tried to infiltrate but now I’m losing.” So for me the protagonist was some kind of double agent who is failing to stay true to themselves. The 10-minute epic of The Globalist seems to me to be the protagonist coming face to face with the big bad guy (whoever he is), who decides to detonate and flatten the entire world before he dies, leaving our protagonist and his/her love interest as the only humans left. If you have listened to Drones, you likely have your own interpretation, and that’s fine, but there’s a good chance it’s not far off of what I got out of it. We might differ on the small points but the general spine of the story is agreed upon. Which, if you were to simply print off the lyrics for each song and read them out without any of the music, is actually pretty incredible: Drones leans heavily on those obtuse lyrics I mentioned earlier. And this is where we get the second key technique of storytelling in a concept album: making the mood. The story of a conceptual album doesn’t just exist through the words, but also through the music. The feel, the tone, the way the words are presented, all serve to gently build the theatre in the mind of the listener, and inform the way they should feel while they listen. This is one of music’s greatest strengths, why some movies would simply feel wrong if they had no soundtrack. Seriously, can you imagine Return of the King’s famous beacon firelighting scene without the music? It wouldn’t work because the music swells with the feel of Gandalf’s words: “Hope is kindled.” Hope is carried through the air on the back of elated strings and a stirring brass section. Music is excellent at pulling at the heartstrings, and is surprisingly effective at inspiring a certain mood in the audience. This is what Drones does so well. The feel of each song conjures certain images in the mind. So where the lyrics may only hint at what is happening in the story, the music itself helps to frame what is happening through the atmosphere of the sound. This is what Drones does so well, and is the reason why so many get the feel for a story without it feeling as though it intrudes on the music. Rather, the story is told through the music. Dead Inside feels robotic, claustrophobic. Psycho is aggressive and abusive. Mercy, with its tinkling piano, gives the album’s first hint of human emotion, of softness. Reapers is wild and full of panic. The Handler is heavy and leaden, as though...yep, oppressed - until that wail of “LET ME GO!”. Defector is at turns euphoric and seething with sweet revenge. And so on. The music echoes the beats of the story itself, and it follows a classic story arc of trigger, quest, climax and resolution. So the story lives through the music, not in spite of it. Each track can conjure a mood which, when played one after the other, stacks up into a kaleidoscope of moods and captured emotions that echo that of a story. If this is combined with the stealth story, then you are coming close to finding what all the best conceptual albums share: music that can be enjoyed on a surface level, but with hidden depths for the more perceptive listener to delve into if they wish. But the music must always come first. I know I’ve repeated ad nauseum how the story comes second on music albums, but let’s be real here: when we have a movie we enjoy, how many times are we going to rewatch it in, say, a year? Twice, maybe three times? Now, how about an album you enjoy? You’re going to replay it at least twenty times or more. No matter how good a story is, it’s going to lose it’s shine after a couple of playthroughs, whereas music is much more durable when it comes to replayability. Being overly pushy on the story front on an album is going to dramatically affect its shelf life, no matter how good that story may be. It can be a tricky balance for music to tell a story, primarily because of the listener’s preconceptions about what music should be. But when the balance is struck, and I believe Drones is a perfect example of this, we get albums that transcend into something else: piece of entertainment that works on multiple levels. Don’t underestimate how much of achievement that is!
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It's an oft repeated mantra of the writing world: to write what you know. To take your experiences and make them fodder for your creative writing.
When I was but a youngster, striking out into the world of writing for the first time, this advice confused me no end. As a 16-year-old, my life experiences were limited to school, homework and biking up to my mate’s house on the weekends to play Mario Kart. How on earth could that translate into creative material? Besides, I don't think all the life experiences of the world could help me with what I was trying to write: an epic adventure spanning galaxies. And it wasn't just me: whenever I'd wonder into my local Waterstones (which was a lot: I used to work there!) I'd wander around the sci-fi and fantasy sections. Books about world's conjured from the imagination, filled with the unreal, the surreal and he fantastic. Many of them excellent, many of them successful. The authors of these books sure hadn't lived in those worlds! So I dismissed that advice out of hand and got on with writing my epic space adventure. And what an adventure it was, both in terms of the content and in the writing of it. I lived and breathed that project for a whole year, drew up elaborate plans stretching as far as book five, sketched pictures of the main characters, made maps. It became my life. When I wasn't writing that book I wanted nothing more than to be back writing it, even in my sleep. When I completed the first draft of that book, I just knew that I’d created something incredible. A story for the ages. And all at the age of 16! I was a child protege! So much for that ‘write what you know’ advice! It was my moral duty to get this book out to agents as soon as possible. They needed to get this onto bookshelves and into reader’s hands right away. So imagine my shock when those rejection letters came rolling in. One after the other, some without even a note of why they rejected it. Those hurt the most. How could this be? What had I missed? Could...could it be that the book wasn't as good as I thought it was? So I hit the books, studying up on the art of writing fiction. Prior to that point I'd only passed a cursory glance across the basics, thinking that I could get by on pure raw passion and enthusiasm. It was then that hit the trough of the Dunning-Kruger Effect: the phenomenon where newbies who are ignorant of the skills required in a craft consider themselves to be better than veterans. The more I learned about how to write - plotting an arc, building characters, theming, show don't tell - the more I realized how little I knew. Rereading my original manuscript after getting a grasp of some of these techniques and key dos and don’ts was a sobering experience. I couldn't fault the enthusiasm in my first draft, but technically it was a mess. Long, meandering sentences. Flat characters. Atrocious pacing. But worst of all, a general feeling of hollowness to the events unfolding in the story. It felt...empty somehow, like things were just happening and characters were simply resigned to go along with it, like apoorly rehearsed play. And all the while that advice kept popping up: write what you know. That was a pretty frustrating period. What was I missing? I was keen to learn, to try and improve my work, but this piece of advice was about as helpful as the classic catch 22 of job hunting: that you can't find a job because you need more experience, yet you can't get said experience because nobody will offer you a job. In this instance, though, I was being asked to ‘know’ about space travel, about interplanetary war, about...well, a fictional world that I had made up! How could I know something I'd invented? And that was when it hit me. That was when I really understood what the ‘write what you know’ mantra truly meant. Because it's not just talking about life experiences. It's not saying that mechanics can only ever write about machines, or doctors can only ever write medical drama. Of course not. Jeff Lindsay invented Dexter but nobody would accuse him of being a serial killer! No, what it means is you have live the world you're creating. You absolutely can build a world from scratch, but you have to understand it inside-out. You must get under the skin of you characters, know what makes them tick, how they'd react in almost any given situation. You must know the history of your world, how it informs the culture and traditions, the factions and tensions that play out to this day as a result of that history. You have to know it. Completely and absolutely. So you can write it, and do it justice. That was the mistake I'd made with my first draft. Sure, it wasn't a total disaster - as I said, I was in love with my own creation and had created this wealth of background material that sketched out bits of the world and history and the characters that occupy it. But that was the problem: they were sketches, nothing more. The characters had bios and I'd assigned arbitrary personality traits to them, but I hadn't actually gotten into their heads and tried to know them. The world I'd created was vast but sparse, seeming to exist purely to drive the plot, rather than being a living breathing place that exists well beyond the realms of the story I was trying to tell. I loved my story, but I didn't know it. Not yet. This is what separates the good from the great. The good can tell a good story, but only the great know their creations so well that they pen the narrative like writing their own diary. The world J.K. Rowling presents in Harry Potter is a perfect example of this: the story follows Harry but you constantly get this sense that this wizarding world exists well beyond the story we’re presented with, has existed long beforehand and will continue to exist for a long time after. JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is famously just a tiny tip of the mythology of Middle Earth, and the sense that there’s a wider world beyond the events that unfold during The War of the Ring aren't an illusion: every detail of Arda has really has been meticulously crafted, most of it never appearing in the main novels, but all contributing to the sense of depth. It's like the difference between shooting on a green screen set and shooting on location: shooting on a set that's been designed purely to present the story that's being told can work, but there's something about shooting on location, in a real city where the cracks in the walls are real and the cobbled streets are polished from the countless feet that have strode across them down the centuries. It offers something a little deeper, a little richer. The world is there for real. It is known. J K Rowling had to walk through every corridor of Hogwarts and beyond before she could bring a Harry Potter to life. JRR Tolkien had hiked across every inch of Middle Earth and taken note of all the languages he'd found before writing the stories of the Baggins. They had to before they could write what they know. Again, 90% of the world they explored would never make it into their publicly released writing, but you can feel it in their words. That they're simply writing what is really happening, rather than ‘making up a story’. That, if they so wish, they could veer the narrative off in any random direction at any time and you'd not be met with a blank and unfinished canvas but yet more works to explore. Finally, I understood. Just because it could never be a real life experience didn't mean I couldn't know it. But it did mean that I’d have to work extra hard to know the world of my space adventure. That I'd have travel to every corner of...well, not just a world, but an entire galaxy of my creation before I could ‘write what I know’. It would be a mammoth task. But it wouldn't be one that I'd have to conjure entirely from my own mind. My real life experiences, such as they were, could offer rich pickings to mix into the fiction. The Shire in Middle Earth is clearly inspired by The Cotswolds. The journey of The Hogwarts Express is inspired by JK Rowling’s own train journeys up to Scotland. And that was another lesson I learned about ‘write what you know’: that if I were to use my own life experiences, they didn't need to be major experiences. Even the little things could help to fill out the corners of my world. What I can see from the train window of my commute. The colorful personalities of my colleagues. My biking trip from last year. It could all contribute to building my knowledge of my world, while also imbuing it with a sense of truth, of reality that rings true to me and hence imbues a sense of gravitas to my writing. To this day, I continue to learn about that world I'm making. I'm still not ready. But when I am, I will be ready to ‘write what I know’ and my writing will be all the better for it. |
Off the ShelfHere I share my ideas, musings and advice on the writing process. I also analyse some of my own writing for examples to show how I work. ShowcaseHere I will show off of some of my favorite good and great stories, gushing lovingly over why I adore them and why you should too. I will also show you the other side of the spectrum: bad examples of stories and what we can learn from them.
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