Writing about music isn’t easy. How can mere words convey the excitement of
a backbeat, a smoking guitar solo,
a throbbing bass rift, or a lead singer throwing his whole body and soul into
the high notes? When I set out to write Catherine, the last thing I meant to do
was write about rock music. For one
thing, I’d just been there and done that.
In my first novel, Jane,
a retelling of Jane Eyre, my
reluctant heroine falls in love with an international rock star on the brink of
his big comeback. In writing that novel,
I drew on everything I knew about arena rock, touring, and the lives of
celebrity musicians. As a hardcore fan
who sees a lot of live music, I’d done a fair amount of imagining what a rock
star’s everyday life would be like, and how a celebrity might find himself
falling in love with an ordinary young woman.
In fact, I’d spent most of my teen years, and, quite a few of my adult
years too, musing on this very subject.
When I finished writing Jane,
I thought I’d said everything I had to say on the subject of music. But when I set out to write Catherine, I was
a little lost. I knew that if I wanted to update Wuthering Heights, I would need a setting that was dramatic and a
little dangerous, one that could be as important to the story as its characters
would be. At first I envisioned a doomed
romance set in the remote and unforgiving climes of New Hampshire’s White
Mountains. I thought Catherine could be
the daughter of a corrupt local politician, and Heathcliff might be at troublemaker
from the wrong side of the tracks. But
my story just didn’t gel. I couldn’t care about it in that intense way a writer
needs to about the worlds she’s trying to build and inhabit.
Then one night about three chapters in I happened to be
seeing a show at the Stone Pony, a legendary club in Asbury Park, New Jersey. As I held my little square of the packed
floor, straining to see above the heads of the people in front of me, letting
the music sweep me along, I felt it again—that old familiar rush I feel when
I’m seeing a really good live show. And
I realized that feeling was a lot like the exhilaration I had felt while
writing Jane. I had missed that passion and I wanted it
back.
I knew, suddenly, what I had to do to make Catherine come alive—for myself and for
readers. I had to set the story in a
world I cared about. I would make it a
different slice of the music world this time—a punk rock nightclub on
Manhattan’s Lower East Side. And Hence,
my Heathcliff character, wouldn’t be a star; he’d be a hungry, striving
guitarist who might make it some day—or who might not. As for Catherine, she’d be the daughter of a
nightclub owner, a club as big and important as CBGB, one that could make or
break the careers of young strivers like Hence.
She’d know better than to fall in love with a musician who might be
interested in her more for her father’s sake than her own—but just this once
she wouldn’t be able to resist.
Catherine fell
into place that night. Picking a setting
and a scenario that mattered to me made all the difference. As hard as it can
be to write about music, to convey its magic with mere words, I seem destined
to try over and over again. Not too
surprisingly, music plays a key role in
Love,
Lucy, my third novel due out in January 2015. And these days I’m even blogging about rock music. Here’s a recent post about Jesse Malin, the
musician I was seeing that fateful night at the Stone Pony, and whose music
kept playing in my head as I wrote
Catherine:
http://aprillindnerwrites.blogspot.com/2013/10/weve-got-that-pma-night-at-wonder-bar.html
