Writing songs versus writing novels

Writing life: 73

Music has long been a vehicle through which we human beings have expressed our creativity and artistic inclinations. In the most modest—and usually private—of ways, music has been part of my creative life since I was just a kid. I’ve been playing guitar and writing songs for more than 45 years, albeit almost always as a solitary, rather than performative, creative pursuit. And now that I’ve been writing novels for nearly 20 years, I thought it might be interesting—well, we’ll find out—to consider how my creative process (such as it is) differs when I’m writing songs versus novels.

I make no great claims to doing either particularly well. So in this post, I’m more interested in the creative methodologies I use when writing songs and novels, than I am in what they produced in the end.

But first, some historical context…

In the beginning…

Music and songwriting

My father played a mean piano—the one that sat in our family room for so many years. My twin brother Tim and I took piano lessons for several years, growing up. Tim and I were also in the Junior Choir at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church here in Toronto. My sister and younger brother were also in the choir. My brother and I joined in 1969 and stuck it out until our voices changed in 1973 when we were 13. Yes, we were late bloomers.

(L-R) Tim Fallis, Terry Fallis (Did I choose those glasses?), Susan Fallis, and David Fallis circa 1973, just moments before my voice changed (Tim’s, too) and our choir career ended.

Tim and I ascended to the lofty heights of Head Boys for our last two years, which meant that we led the choir up the aisle each Sunday. Of course, as soon as our voices changed, our choir days were over. (Coincidentally, the Head Girl at the time was none other than Anne Lindsay, longtime violinist with Blue Rodeo and Jim Cuddy Band. Anne was a few years older, and it’s fair to say that nearly every boy in the choir had a crush on her. She remains an extraordinary talent. But I digress.)

In our youth, Tim and I sang together around the house all the time. I remember our early primitive vocal arrangements when we first discovered the miracle of harmony. I think we first discovered singing harmony in the John Denver classic—a hit first for Peter, Paul and Mary—Leaving on a Jet Plane.

We were probably 10 years old at the time. When we were a little older, we both saved our babysitting money (true!) and bought a cheap Radio Shack stereo receiver that featured two built-in cassette tape decks, and two microphones. This allowed us to play a music track through one tape deck, and record us singing to it on the second tape deck. In the end, it yielded the fidelity of a tiny transistor radio playing in an empty apple juice can, but still, it was kind of thrilling to hear ourselves singing “backed” by real music.

Anyway, in our teenage years, Tim stuck with the piano and I switched to guitar. And we both started writing songs. In our early twenties, we even ventured into a local studio to record a few of our songs.

Our first two semi-serious recordings

In 1985 we saved our money and recorded two original songs in a real recording studio. We were 25. As I recall, it was a 24-track operation located in Newmarket, Ontario, just north of Toronto. The studio was often used as a rehearsal space for Glass Tiger, a local band that hit the charts with a few of their songs. Recording was a slow process. It took us two 10-hour days laying down instrumental and vocal tracks to record just two songs.

(Somehow, we still have those recordings. But be gentle. These are nearly 40-year-old analog recordings that were played for years on cassette tape before finally being digitized. So the sound is a little rough—not to mention our singing and playing. For us both, music and songwriting have never been more than a quiet, private, but very satisfying passion.)

Taylor Park (Tim Fallis 1983. Recorded 1985)

Tim wrote the first song we ever recorded, called Taylor Park, about an old man remembering when his city used to be a town. Tim played piano and sang lead while I played guitar and handled the harmonies.

The Cottage Song (Terry Fallis 1984. Recorded 1985))

I wrote the second song we ever recorded, simply called The Cottage Song. I wrote it while working on Parliament Hill in 1984. It’s about the cottage a few fellow political staffers and I rented on the Ottawa River for the summer. It’s about the stress of the job and the weekend relief the cottage and the river provided. I’m playing guitar and singing lead while my brother is on piano and doing the harmonies.

Writing novels

My history writing novels is not as long, though I think the seeds were sown while I was still just a boy. You see, my father, a pediatric surgeon, was a great lover of language. You may recall a post I wrote about his writerly influence last spring. He revered language and its proper usage. No grammatical infraction went unnoticed—or more to the point, uncorrected—in our household. Over time, I seemed to inherit my father’s affinity, and even love, for language. He went on to write several books, mainly medical texts.

I was in late high school when I began to appreciate that I just might have some facility for language and writing. I seemed to find writing stories and essays easier than many of my classmates did. And I actually enjoyed the process of writing, though I was not—as I’ve noted before in this space—a book nerd. I read, but not incessantly and not with a particularly literary orientation.

The turning point in my writing life was preceded by a renewed commitment to reading fiction in my mid-twenties, a practice that became—and remains—important to me. My interest in creative writing arrived later in life for me than for most writers. It was largely a desire to emulate the writers of the books I was reading and loving—John Irving, Robertson Davies, Mordecai Richler, Paul Quarrington, Stephen Fry, Nora Ephron, among many other writers. While I wrote a handful of short stories in the ‘80s, I didn’t write my first novel until 2005 when I was 45 years old.

Skipping ahead to the present, I’ve now written ten novels (#10 due out in October), and I’m about halfway through my eleventh.

---

The creative process: Writing songs

But what’s really happening when I’m writing a song? Unlike writing novels, songwriting for me has always felt very organic and intuitive. So I’ve tried to analyze in hindsight just how I tend to go about the process of writing songs. And I’ve realized that it hasn’t changed much in the nearly 50 years since I wrote my first back in 1977.

When I was 17 and wrote my first song, I wasn’t a very skilled guitar player—and still am not—so I was composing using a very limited number of chords. As I became more proficient on the six-string, and twelve-string, my songs inevitably became a little more creative and diverse.

The music

Writing songs for me always starts with a chord progression I like, and the feeling those chords evoke. Usually, I have an idea of what the song is to be about before I write it. This is important because it helps me determine the “vibe” of the song. If it’s a sad song about, say, a break up, I might lean on variations of minor chords. If it’s a happier, more upbeat song, I’ll likely rely on different versions of major chords. I almost always have both, with the predominance of one over the other helping to dictate the overall emotion of the song.

Some songs are strummed while others are fingerpicked—and sometimes I do both in different parts of the song. Again, it just depends on the sound and feel I’m aiming to convey and engender in the listener.

So I’ll play through the chord progression I’d come up with, over and over, trying different chords at either end to extend the music to an appropriate length. When I feel like the chord progression is long enough and catchy enough to support a verse, I’ll then work on the melody. Every chord progression provides the musical scaffolding for innumerable melodies. I would hum various different tunes over and over until one emerged as the most memorable, the most dominant of those I’d been auditioning. I want it to sound, well, melodic, without sounding too much like any other song—always a challenge.

As I hum the verse, that melody I’d come up with would often lead me directly into a new section of the song. It felt like a musical momentum of sorts would carry me into what would become the chorus, the most recognizable, memorable, repeated, refrain in the song. The chorus is different from the verses but closely connected to it. (Sometimes, the chords I’d originally come up with for the verse would in fact wind up being the chorus, or vice-versa.)

Then there was but one musical element of the song left to write—the bridge. The bridge is a departure from the melody driving the verses and the chorus. It gives the listener a break from the repetitive nature of the verses and chorus, but nicely leads back into the familiar—often another chorus—that carries the listener through to the end of the song.

I have often completed songs musically before I’ve written the first lyrics, or occasionally even before knowing what the song is about.

Working again on a lapsed song. I’m not holding my breath.

The lyrics

For me, the songs I’ve written that have stuck with me and stayed in my private repertoire, are those that seemed almost to write themselves, often when I’m going through something. Like the song Until the New Year, that you’ll find in my most recent novel, A New Season. I wrote the song in 1981 at McMaster University when I was really missing my then new girlfriend. She’d just finished her last Christmas exam and had gone home to Nova Scotia, leaving me still on campus and feeling, well, bereft.

When you’re in a somewhat emotional state, I find the words often come more easily. Lyrics are so often about timing and rhyming. It usually means that you need to rhyme corresponding lines in the verses and often in the chorus, too. So it does require some patience and creativity to accurately convey the meaning behind the song while honouring the rhyming convention. The other limitation of course is the timing of the song itself. The lyrics must perfectly fit the metre of the song—the timing of each verse. And that’s not always easy. I’ve killed many an hour searching for the perfect word to end a verse while respecting the necessary timing and rhyming.

Finally, a standard length song only runs 200-300 words, and of course, that includes repeating the chorus a few times. So you really have to make the words count in the verses. You only have so many words to tell a complete story.

For these reasons, writing song lyrics is more like composing poetry than writing novels. And I’m no poet.

For example: Two original songs

Here are the recordings (just my guitar and voice) and lyrics for the two original songs I included in my most recent novel, A New Season. The novel is fiction of course, but the songs are in fact real. (For better or worse, these recordings have actually been incorporated into the official audiobook.)

More Than the Game (Terry Fallis 2011. Recorded 2023.)

This is a strumming song about the mens ball hockey league I’ve played in for more than 20 years. (Yes, it’s a different kind of love song.)

Until the New Year (Terry Fallis 1981. Recorded 2023.)

This is the fingerpicking love song mentioned earlier, that I wrote back in 1981. I was missing my then new girlfriend “until the new year” when she would return to campus and we could be together again. That song has stayed with me for more than 43 years largely because she stayed with me. We’ve now been married for more than 37 years. (The lyrics may be a bit sappy, but I was 25 and in love.)

---

The creative process: Writing novels

I’ve written at some length here on Substack about my novel writing, so I won’t dwell on it at length here beyond laying out the fundamentals. I usually have an issue I’m trying to examine in my novels—like the state of our democracy, gender inequality, ageism, grief, family, etc. Then I try to come up with a story and characters that will help me dig into that particular issue and, I hope, persuade the reader—consciously or unconsciously—to think about that issue. Of course I hope the story and those characters will keep the reader interested, engaged, and often laughing, from first page to last.

I carry the story around in my brainpan for months on end, letting it steep and ferment, and generally emerge and/or evolve. At some point, it feels as if my characters and story have somehow matured, ripened so to speak, and are ready for primetime. So I then shift into heavy outlining mode that ultimately yields an 80-90 page detailed, scene-by-scene, bullet point version of the novel. To me, developing this very detailed outline is the very heart of my creative novel-writing process, and takes much longer than writing the actual manuscript.

Then I write the 85k-100k word manuscript in a fevered sprint of sorts over the course of two to three months, based on that detailed 80-90 page bullet point outline. So, in a nutshell, that’s my creative process for writing novels.

---

I’ve always liked this quotation about creativity.

The two creative processes: Similarities and differences

I confess that writing songs and writing novels feel like two quite different endeavours to me. I suppose if I wrote poetry, there might be more overlap in the two creative processes. But novels and songs? Not so much, at least for me.

I have written a few songs in very short time spans. If the moment is right. If the story and associated emotions are there. If you luck out and stumble upon a great guitar hook or chord progression to start you off, the whole song can pour out of you quickly. I’ve written some songs from start to finish (like Until the New Year for example) in about an hour. Those feel like magical creative moments when it’s almost as if you are channeling the song rather than composing it. Others have taken years to complete, and I have a few that remain unfinished.

It’s hard to compare writing a song in an hour—one that I still sing to myself and sometimes to my wife 43 years after I wrote it—and writing a novel in 18 months. But there are some similarities even if time isn’t one of them.

Both songs and novels are telling stories. They are told in different formats and obviously in different lengths and with vastly differing degrees of detail, but both still have storytelling at their centres.

In writing both songs and novels, the writer is desperately trying to make their audiences feel something—joy, heartbreak, humour, outrage, etc. While the songwriter and novelist employ different tools and timing, there is definitely creative overlap in this shared desire to take their respective audiences on an emotional journey of sorts.

While the novelist only has words, they also have a larger canvas to tell their story. Conversely, the songwriter has words AND music, but only about three to four minutes (if we’re talking about a conventional song). All creative endeavours are beset with tradeoffs. But both novels and songs do employ words, and those words matter.

Finally, and I don’t know this with any certainty, but even though both creative disciplines feel quite different to me, I suspect I’m using the same parts of my brain and heart when writing songs or novels.

In the end…

While the product differs—songs versus novels—what remains the same for both is the writer’s creative wellspring. And understanding where that comes from is a more challenging question and a post for another day.

I feel privileged to have had some experience with songwriting and novel writing, though the former has been, as I’ve noted, a more private passion for me. Cracking the creative code that leads to art is difficult, and trying to explain it is even harder. But thinking about it all is time well spent.

---

Thanks for making it through this one. Your comments are always welcome. Here’s hoping you’ll subscribe if you haven’t already. It’s free and easy, and you won’t miss and future biweekly posts. Many thanks.