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So that's a video of journalist Jeff Gordinier explaining how he built his book tour from scratch. It's a do-it-yourself post that all writers can use.

Gordinier is Editor-at-Large at Details magazine, and he's been our special guest this week, talking about X Saves the World--his new book that explores Generation X with a more sophisticated kind of journalism.

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:
From your deep-reading of Kurt Cobain lyrics to your passionate defense of Boston, this book hums. It depends on music--you describe how it sounds, feels, and changes us. Any advice for putting a little rock & roll in our prose?

Jeff Gordinier:
Sometimes I think that writers are people who were supposed to take a different career path, but got thwarted: They ended up writing, but through their writing they find a way to keep on doing the type of job that they’d originally intended to do. Continue reading...

 

By which I mean: There are writers who write like lawyers, and writers who write like preachers, and writers who write like organic farmers, and probably even writers who write like porn stars.

If I hadn’t become a writer I probably would’ve become a musician. My risible ineptitude at the piano saved me from that fate, although I’m sure that in some parallel universe there’s a doppelganger Gordinier playing “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” for woozy divorcees at Foxwoods.

Anyway, I studied composition for a while, and music’s a droolingly massive part of my life, and even though it’s pretentious to say this, I care a lot about the way words sound and the rhythm that carries the reader from one sentence to the next. I actually do believe that writers should read their stuff out loud to see whether or not it, you know, sings.     

I listen to a lot of music when I’m writing. Not at the beginning, because then it seems to interfere with my highly distractible brain. But later, when a piece is nearing completion, yeah, you’ll often find me blasting Pavement or Miles Davis (the sick Seventies jazz/funk period) or (why not) Boston at Eustachian-tube-draining levels on the iMac. Maybe that seeps into the writing somehow. I don’t know.    

I haven’t really answered your question. I guess the way you write about music depends on the way you listen to it. I’m not an intellectual listener; I’m not on some quest for “meaning” in Beck’s lyrics.

Most lyrics are nonsense, anyhow, and besides, the way I absorb music is brainless — I approach it as an athletic or sexual or narcotic thing. I’m drawn to the momentum of music, the way it messes with your headspace, the way you get physically and emotionally sucked into it.

I guess it’s true that writers don’t always give you that sensation, but maybe some of them just have no interest in doing so. They’re more inclined toward the scholarly. Then again, David Fricke at Rolling Stone is a genius at conveying what music sounds and feels like. (If you want evidence, track down his sublime review of Radiohead’s Kid A.)

The British author Geoff Dyer captured the incantatory rush of jazz in his 1996 book But Beautiful, and even though it wasn’t a book about music, per se, I thought that Dave Eggers managed to do it with outlandish success in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The scene in that book when Dave and Toph arrive in California and speed up along the Pacific Coast singing along to Journey — Jesus, that’s unforgettable.

Want some more Jeff Gordinier action? Follow these links for the rest of his writing advice...

How To Build Magazine Writing Career

How To Write a Book With A Day Job And A Family

How To Write Funny

How To Build A Better Interview