'What I Wanted to Get Into My Writing'

Clive James in his essay on Louis Armstrong in Cultural Amnesia (2007): “[F]or the way I thought prose should move I learned a lot from jazz. From the moment I learned to hear them in music, syncopation and rhythm were what I wanted to get into my writing. And to stave off the double threat of brittle chatter and chesty verve, I also wanted the measured, disconsolate tread of the blue reverie.” Genuine influence is difficult to gauge in any writer, and probably in the other arts. Copying, a watered-down form of plagiarism, is easy to see. If you read Cormac McCarthy, you’re reading refried Faulkner. That’s not a crime but it’s also not interesting. So, what can any writer learn from music and musicians? James is right to concentrate on rhythm, the way a sentence moves without being too obvious about it. You take the material at hand (your subject, what you want to say) and align it with the rhythm in your head. This is subtle and covert and most readers will never notice – precisely…