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“The rest of the band waits, they're letting the groove get in the pocket, hit bottom. It does; and now two drummers join in, they weave a polyrhythm that brings in one guitar and some pops from a banjo, oh this groove is young, but it's growing, and people are starting to move. Now a singer steps up to the mike, puts out some blues that two more singers turn to gospel, harmonies deep and wide that make you want to believe.” 

That's a blazing passage from Spaceman Blues by Brian Francis Slattery, a first-time novelist who took his experiences with music, immigrants, travel, and politics, boiling them in a hallucinatory stew. 

He's our special guest this week, talking about writing tips, day job survival, novel publishing, and musical language. 

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson's mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:
Your novel sings. There are remarkable musical sections sprinkled throughout, and your sentences sound stunning when I read them out loud. You play music in real life. How did you inject music into your prose, thematically and line-by-line? Any advice for fledgling writers looking to make their prose sound more musical, more rhythmic? What did you listen to while you wrote the book?

Brian Francis Slattery:
I'm so glad you hear the groove in my writing--it makes it more fun for me to write like that, and I hope it's more fun for readers to read it. Continue reading...

Thematically, it came pretty naturally to inject music into the story and scenery, as music is a big part of my daily life; I'm often either playing it or listening to it, and I'm that guy who hears a horn line from a passing car, then goes into the nearest record store and sings the horn line to the guy at the counter, because I need to own that song.

Making the prose itself sound more musical, though, was really thanks to a lot of revising and rewriting. In the world of literature, Old English poetry was a real inspiration to me--I'm a huge fan of alliteration, and much Old English poetry has this steady, insistent beat that I find totally hypnotic.

I was also listening to a lot of African music at the time (still do), and at the risk of sounding like a real blowhard or space cadet or whatever, I got really hooked on the idea of trying to write in a polyrhythmic sort of way--to see if I could build a story the same way that the music I was listening to built a groove.

But you're right that the book was inspired by a lot of specific musicians. Many of them are name-checked in the book itself, but the albums that really helped me figure out what I wanted the book to feel like were the first half of Tom Waits's Rain Dogs, and most of Parliament's Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome, which really knock me out to this day, both musically and lyrically.

They do with near-complete success in music what I try to do on the page.