Top 5 Tips For Writing a Music Book
Craft talk season.
CRYBABY came to me in a dream. It was worked out on a typewriter, through talking endlessly on long drives with my wife, and hammering away at the desk where I sit writing this dispatch.
A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to be on The Music Book Podcast with Marc Masters. We talked at length about the process of writing CRYBABY, from the small decisions to bigger ideas about structure and craft. The entire conversation was one of my favorite interviews to-date.
I wanted to share some reflections on writing a music book since talking to Marc got my mind spinning in all sorts of directions. It’s craft talk, folks. It’s the best.
Music Book Top Tips
Structure informs narrative, and narrative informs structure. Choose wisely.
Look for trends in your manuscript and address them honestly in revision.
Don’t self-edit every 5,000 words. This is an awful practice no one should do.
Don’t conflate editing and revising. This is also awful and will slow you down.
Embrace the idea of a Draft 0.
As you can see, a lot of the CRYBABY process was about unlearning bad self-editing and revising habits. As I talked about with Marc, during most of CRYBABY, I would return to the top of the manuscript every 5,000 words and “try and fix it up” based on what I learned about my narrative points in the batch of words I most recently wrote.
If that sounds like it’d give you a headache, it will. It did for me. This is not a good way to write a book, or anything, for that matter. I think the damning process of over-self-editing comes from a desire to always be working, responding, and learning to the text. I want to do a good job at all times, but it’s important to remember no one is publishing the very first words and ideas to spill out of my head.
Self-editing is the byproduct of unnecessary pressure. There’s a fine line between wanting to deliver a decent first draft and self-sabotage. This is where the concept of a Draft 0 comes in. I really fell in love with this for my third music book, where the current Draft 0 is in my agent’s hands. Adding this “0 Step” into my process takes the pressure of perfection away and gives me space to play, explore, and write unencumbered. It’s been awesome for my MG novel as well.
The Draft 0 for a music book is even more effective because you are dealing with real stories, real textures, and real people. I feel an immense need to get it right, right away, when it comes to describe a piece of music or capturing an artist’s story. Draft 0 lets your play and embrace your own humanity as an author—you are as imperfect and messy as your subjects and you won’t get it right the first time. It’s so painful for me to accept that perfection is not on the table, but working in the Draft 0, Draft 1, Draft 2… setup lets me ease into the idea that everything can be just a little more flexible.
Structure first, narrative second?
I wrestled with the structure of CRYBABY quite a bit. As I tell Marc on the podcast, during a 2.5-hour car ride with my wife to go on vacation, I wouldn’t stop bouncing between structural philosophies for CRYBABY. She was very patients and supportive, and mostly listened to me say one thing, then another, then combine both things, then propose a fourth thing.
The pain here is all because I started drafting CRYBABY right away—not an actual problem, and something I enjoy is sketching ideas for music books as if I were writing loose scenes in fiction—without fully considering what it would look like. I wanted the book to be arranged by song, then by album, then by year, and of course we settled on the book being arranged by artist because artists are the root of songs, albums, and exist by year all on their own.
Once I cracked the code of the book’s structure, it was much easier to weave a larger narrative into CRYBABY about youth culture, technology, being a young man in America, and so on and so forth. Something my editor said to me many years ago was about always putting the person first whenever you write about music. This key adage helped me make the final structural decisions for CRYBABY. Once I figured out the order of operations for the text, writing became far less plodding of an activity.
Somewhere in this podcast, I tell Marc I wrote CRYBABY in the most unintuitive way possible, and that still feels true as I look through old scraps of notes and drafts on my laptop. But I’m so glad to have muscled through all these poor craft decisions to write a book I’m proud of—plus, I’ve done away with most of my bad habits over the course of my last two manuscripts.
Ending with a truisim: if you can see the growth, you’re growing. It’s really so simple.
Thanks for reading and following along. You can find my full podcast with Marc Masters on the writing of CRYBABY here. Marc is great and the other 51 episodes of his podcast are well worth a listen if you’re interested in the craft of music writing.
Until next time.