David Baerwald's debut historical fiction novel traces the rise and fall of fascism the first half of the 20th century and its later re-birth at the outset of the Cold War.Amy Dickerson/Supplied
For more than 40 years, I have been a lyricist, musician, and composer by trade. I did this work for over three decades before retiring in 2017 to work almost exclusively as a novelist. My first novel comes out in June.
This novel, The Fire Agent, has nothing to do with songwriting, or with Hollywood, and I mention my former life only because
A: It is writing lyrics that gave me the tools to write the book
B: It’s writing music that gave me the forms to structure it.
I suggest that learning to write a melody, a chord change, a song lyric on demand can be excellent training for many things, particularly the writing of novels. I would like to make a case that this approach should be at least considered in every writing program, where possible. Writing programs: Find lyricists and yeah musicians!
Now, not every lyricist/composer is suitable for the long job of novel-writing, nor may many have much to offer an academic writing program. In fact, like many people, when I hear about songwriters writing books, even great songwriters like Bob Dylan, I’ve tended to respond with a degree of indulgence: “Oh, how nice,” I might say, sort of how I might when I see those beautiful elephants who’ve learned to paint watercolours, or a newscaster taking a stab at a crime thriller. You don’t really expect the watercolour or thriller to be objectively any good, but it’s nice that they did it, I suppose.
On the other hand, skills are skills; they can be scaled up or down. The remote-control-toy-airplane builder might be able to design and build a full-sized plane. Having learned to paint a watercolour, our elephant might want to learn to paint a house.
Regardless, after having spent the last eight years doing nothing but novel-writing, and about 40 years before that doing nothing but writing lyrics and music, I think I’ve earned the right to say a few words in defence of songwriting and composition as a preparation for even the most complex of novels, and to suggest incorporating a musical education into writing programs.
“What do you offer in evidence?” you may ask. “Hold my beer,” I reply, and present The Fire Agent, a book of historical fiction that traces the rise and fall of fascism in the first half of the 20th century – and then fascism’s rebirth in the heart of the U.S. intelligence services at the outset of the Cold War.
The Fire Agent is told through the eyes of Baerwald's grandfather, a German industrial spy who later switched his loyalties to the United States in 1933.Supplied
This story is told through the eyes of my grandfather Ernst Baerwald, the idealistic and privileged son of a prominent German-Jewish educator and historian. Ernst, rather than being directed into a career in finance or banking or the law, as most of his brothers and peers were, was guided into a career as a German industrial spy.
He was trained in espionage, chemistry and the Japanese culture and language for nine years in Milan before being sent to Japan in 1910, where he was based for most of his career working for the industrial behemoth IG Farben. He secretly switched his loyalties to the United States in 1933, when IG Farben and Germany full-throatedly embraced the Nazis. For nearly eight years after that, Ernst remained in Japan as a kind of triple agent, with loyalties toward a rapidly shrinking (murdered) democratic faction of the Japanese government while reporting to both Germany and the U.S., his true motivations a mystery even to himself.
The Fire Agent covers 47 years of high drama, tracing Ernst’s career from his graduation in 1900 to his brief moment of relative sunlight as an instructor at the U.S. Army Intelligence School in San Francisco, until he was banished to the shadows again with the advent of the Cold War. There were a lot of busy years in between, what with two world wars, a rewriting of the world order, and the rise of fascism, not to mention messy love affairs and the general complications of being alive.
Why did a lifetime of writing songs and film music make me think I could write such a complicated book as a fiction debut? When my Canadian publicist asked me this, I said something like, “I’ve been writing miniatures all my life, I just have to apply that to a larger scale.” When my New York publicist asked me the same question I made a variation of the same answer. “I just thought of writing a novel as if I were writing 600 related songs.”
At the end, I don’t think my confidence was misplaced. First, story-telling of any kind requires structure, concision and emotional content, and lyric writing almost begins and ends with these three. Writing lyrics demands that you be concise. There is no room to waste in a narrative lyric. And if the listener doesn’t feel anything, the song is nothing.
Second, unreliable narrators, framing, shifting perspectives, quick characterizations, mood changes, tension and release, flow, conflict, maintaining interest, wordplay, overcoming or short-circuiting writer’s block – these are all important residents of both the lyricist’s and the novelist’s toolkit.
It isn’t just lyric-writing experience that can help a novelist. Music carries its own lessons. When I first started writing film music about 25 years ago, the inimitable composer Hans Zimmer gave me a critique of a three-minute semi-orchestral tune of mine that he was rejecting, by saying, “It sounds too much like music, it’s distracting.” I said, “Well, what am I supposed to write?” He rolled his eyes at me. “The story, idiot. Write the story.” And he was right. The story is the important bit, not how cleverly you get from one note to another. You need to learn not to necessarily kill all your children, but to at least keep them under the hood. Film composers generally shouldn’t call attention to themselves. Neither should a novelist.
More musical lessons await for the writer of prose. As a composer, or even an arranger, one finds oneself quite often writing for monophonic instruments such as horns, strings, woodwinds, voice, etc. – instruments that usually only play one note at a time. This teaches a songwriter to look at chords not as blocks, as untrained musicians usually do, but as individual melodies intersecting, together creating constantly shifting harmonies while retaining their own melodic integrity, like those clouds of starlings making those constantly shifting shapes in the sky.
This concept applies directly to novel-writing, particularly in complex sequences where one might be called upon to simultaneously line up historical events, real-life figures and their primary characters’ ever-changing internal and external lives. What initially is a source of anxiety can become a source of music. Each character has a melody, or at least a tone, and following these tones and melodies steadfastly can lead an author through even the most complex of sequences.
There are many of these tricks available to the songwriting novelist, too many to list here. But the last, and possibly most important series of lessons prose writers can glean from music is the first thing I try to teach songwriting students: Your Parental Critic, that inner voice of self-doubt and judgement, is not your friend. Your unconscious is where your true powers live. Access your unconscious and trust in that. That is where your power lies.
David Baerwald is a Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter, composer, and recording artist. In addition to his own critically-acclaimed albums, he has collaborated with Joni Mitchell, Rickie Lee Jones, Sheryl Crow and Baz Luhrmann, among others. The Fire Agent is his debut novel.