The literary blogger Maud Newton posted yesterday about the “soundtrack approach to novel writing.” It’s a solution to so-called writer’s block: “My friend had a surprisingly practical suggestion: Give each part [of a novel] its own soundtrack. Listen to different music as you work on each section, and make sure it’s the same music every time. . . . [T]he words will just flow out.” I confess to having written a (stubbornly unpublished) novel while listening only to supernatural calypso, but I’m wary of any “technique” that further tightens the ties binding fiction to film.
Why do I say this? It’s a helpful coincidence that at the top of her “Remainders” sidebar, Ms. Newton has linked to Wes Anderson’s stilted, abysmal Hotel Chevalier script, published in Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story. It seems that material written for the screen can hypnotize a literary audience, and very much vice versa. Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, for instance, either perplexed or invited the ridicule of many critics until the Brothers Coen gave it an extreme—which is to say, nasty, brutish, and long—makeover for the Sanguinary Screen.
Here was a story so clearly and in so mercenary a fashion written for the movies that its release as a novel should simply have been passed over. If I could have it another way, I’d take Oprah’s beloved The Road as a movie and No Country as a better, more fleshed-out book—and, believe me, The Road has flesh to spare. Why does everyone, from goofy Nick Hornby to ghoulish McCarthy, write as though he’d rather be polishing up a screenplay? Is it just because there’s no money in books, or is there something about the vocabulary of the movies that continues to slice away at the primacy of the printed word?