A new Silent Night

A few days ago I did something I've never done before. I released a song on YouTube. There was nothing particularly fancy about the production. It was simply a home-made live take with one voice and two guitars, and I needed some help doing it (thankyou Olivia and Daniel). But it's the song itself I want to talk about in this blog. You see, writing this song was somewhat audacious, since it was a new tune for a 200-year-old classic Christmas carol.

I'd actually written this new 'Silent Night' tune years ago, but it was only recently I decided to do something with it. The reason it seems rather audacious is that (of course) Silent Night already has a perfectly good tune (and a very pretty one), a tune known and loved by millions around the world. So why write a new—and different—melody?

Part of the answer (though only part) is that the idea of writing a new Silent Night tune inspired me. As a creative person, I get lots of ideas. Some of these ideas are best expressed in poems, some in short stories, some in picture books, some in little novels, some in short plays or non-fiction articles. But other ideas are musical, and so need to find expression in musical form. That's what this idea was
—an attempt to write a new tune for Silent Night that I could love as much as Franz Gruber's 1818 original.

The new melody came quite quickly to me. After all, it was simple and fairly short. But it had to feel 'right' as a melody that would suit Silent Night. So, it's probably worth pointing out, that it therefore had to fulfil at least three requirements.

Firstly, the new tune had to exactly fit the meter of the English lyrics. (The lyrics had been originally penned by Joseph Mohr in German in 1818, but it was the most common English translation that I followed.) So my tune was in three-four time, similar to Gruber's famous three-eight tune, and the placement of my notes fit the flow of the words. Yet the internal rhythmic structure of my new tune, as well as the actual new melody, was almost entirely distinct; almost, though not quite, for the words virtually required that there be at least some slight correspondences between old and new in the internal rhythm.

Secondly, my tune had to be fresh and new; otherwise, what was the point. Thus, the chordal structure was new and had (I think) a little sense of 'journey' to it from beginning to end. Overall, too, the melody was—to my ears at least—lyrical and even lovely. It pleased me, and my hope was that it would please others too.

Thirdly, I wanted the tune to have a 'classical' feel to it. What this actually meant, I had no idea. After all, I have very little knowledge of music 'theory'. But I sort of felt, by instinct, that this melody did the job. I liked it, and it sounded sort of 'classical'. To me, the melody seemed as if it could've been written any time in the last 300 years!

Anyway, it's now over to others. Does anyone else out there in Internet-land like this simple, lyrical alternative Silent Night tune? Would anyone else like to sing it for themselves? It will be interesting to find out.

You can see the YouTube clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXWqGNFChH0 or by tracking it down via my Facebook page at facebook.com/peterfriendwriting.

Why I like the Grinch

It was only in recent years that I discovered Dr Seuss' How the Grinch stole Christmas (pictured). In fact, I saw the movie (starring Jim Carrey) before I found a copy of the book and read the original for myself. The movie quickly became one of my favourite-ever movies. And the book, similarly, delights me when I re-read it―as I did this week, twice―even though it is so much more simple than the film.

As a writer of children's verse, I am interested in Dr Seuss' Grinch from a professional point of view, quite apart from my private delight as a reader, although the two are linked. And what seems inescapable is that much of the power of the Grinch story derives from the fact that the Grinch is a great villain, yet lovable at the same time. He's an outcast, a loner, deluded to the point of committing a heinous crime against an entire town. He's also a greatly troubled individual, who cannot bear the noise and joy of ordinary society and so wants to spread misery to everyone. Even though he isn't "human", the Grinch has so much of the darker, mournful side of humanity about him that the reader cannot help but recognise him as familiar. In the end, his fault is boiled down in the book to one thing: his heart is "two sizes too small"―a delightful encapsulation of his fundamental condition.

And so the Grinch commits his great crime, stealing all the Christmas presents, decorations and food from the town of Whoville. Near the end of the book, of course, comes the great twist. In spite of his efforts, the Grinch doesn't stop Christmas from coming. It comes, even without the presents and trappings. The inhabitants of Whoville are still able to rejoice and sing, simply because it's Christmas. This revelation leads to the Grinch's own redemption; his heart grows "three sizes that day", and he returns all that he has pinched and joins in the celebrations with the rest of the town.

The whole story is given a light touch, not only by the crazy illustrations but also by the constant rhythm of the comic verse, and by the rhyming scheme. The rhythm is accented on every third syllable, and there are four of these units in every line, to give what is in strict terms anapestic tetrameter, i.e.da-da-DA da-da-DA da-da-DA da-da-DA. Dr Seuss doesn't follow this meter slavishly; sometimes syllables are dropped, and sometimes lines are split so that they appear on the page as two or three shorter lines instead of one long one. But the general rhythm provides a structure that basically extends through the whole book. And the rhymes are often delicious too.

Now, the whole point of this blog is to point out one very important truth. The power of Dr Seuss' text doesn't come solely from his clever rhyming verse; nor does it come solely from his wonderful character-driven story. The book is successful because Dr Seuss manages to meld both these things so beautifully. It is a fantastic story, but it is also a fantastic story written in wonderfully crafted verse. The two things meet, and the result is a book that has become a classic.

I often try to keep this double-truth in front of me when I write children's verse. I try to go all the way in imagining crazy character-driven stories, and I work hard to get the rhyming verse to really "sing".

Perhaps you'd like to get a copy of Dr Seuss' How the Grinch stole Christmas, and notice it all fresh for yourself!

My 10-tonne elephant

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view) I don't really own a 10-tonne elephant. I only own an imaginary one. But, since this elephant of mine figures quite prominently in the crazy kids' novel I have just finished writing, I thought it might be worthwhile telling you about it. This elephant, in fact, may even make it into the novel's title―that's if the publisher ends up using the title "The Elephant Heist" (pictured) which I hope they will.

Let me tell you the set-up for my novel, and then you might understand why I so wanted the elephant. You see, the story is about an ordinary town that wakes up one morning to find the town's bank has been robbed during the night. But I didn't want this bank heist to be ordinary. I wanted it to be dramatic and wacky, because this was a novel for kids aged around 8-12 years and I wanted the plot to be pushed to the max wherever possible. So, the two bandits in the story did a strange thing. They didn't just break into the bank with a sledgehammer in the middle of the night, or dig a tunnel underneath. No, they had one of their henchmen fly a plane at 30,000 feet over the town. Furthermore, they had nabbed (from who knows where) a huge African male elephant that very unwillingly was now forced to play a major part in the heist. Fixing a giant saddle on the elephant's back, and slipping the elephant into an enormous parachute harness, the bandits then hopped on while the huge beast was PUSHED out of the airplane. Down, down, down the elephant zoomed in the parachute. The two bandits guided the elephant by means of a massive rudder they had fixed onto the elephant's back. Then, with a large CRASH, the bull elephant smashed through the roof of the town bank. The bandits were in!

Thus the town woke up the next morning to a double emergency. Not only had the bank been robbed, with the bandits still at large (presumably) somewhere in the town, but also there was a massive and very angry African elephant inside the bank that couldn't get out.

This was the sort of set-up that gave me something wonderful to work with in the remainder of the novel. The town was in an uproar. The media was frenetic. The police were trying to track down the bandits. And four kids and a Dobermann were drawn into the middle of it all, and become, as the novel progresses, key to resolving the whole outrageous situation.

So you can see (hopefully) why my elephant was key. He turned a fairly humdrum set-up into a very wacky one, surrounded, by the very nature of things, with heaps of drama and possibility.

I'll probably tell you more about The Elephant Heist novel in some future blogs. And, if you're interested, you can follow me on Facebook at facebook.com/peterfriendwriting to hear news of where and when this novel might actually be published! It should be LOADS of fun.

Why our goldfish isn't famous

                                                  

We’ve had our goldfish for almost two years now (pictured). But I’ve never yet felt inspired to write a story or poem about her (or a play or article or novel or anything else). There’s a reason for this. She doesn’t do much. She swims around her bowl, in and out of the weed. Once a day she gobbles up some fish pellets. She looks sort of graceful gliding through the water. But that’s about it. That’s why our goldfish isn’t famous—at least not until just now when I published her photo for not being famous.

By contrast, I have written stories or poems about elephants, ostriches, crocodiles, bears, rhinos and anacondas. And once a very angry Southern Cassowary took centre stage. Much to the relief of my family, I have never owned any of these animals as pets. But I’ve seen all of them in zoos, and I have read about them in books and seen them in documentaries. They are all creatures of drama and pizazz; kids, it seems, love meeting them in literature.

Recently I finished drafting a little novel for kids. It’s a crazy story, which I’ll probably tell you more about in a future blog. It’s about a parachute and two bandits and a bank heist and a ten-tonne elephant and a group of kids in an otherwise ordinary town. But it’s a certain fish that I want to tell you about right now. You see, the boy in the story lives in an ordinary sort of house in the suburbs. They have a fish tank in their dining room with a fish in it.

Now, I could have made the fish a goldfish. After all, goldfish are the most common pet fish in the world and it would have helped depict the domestic scene of the boy’s ordinary life. But I wanted something more dramatic. That’s why I chose a Lion Fish. Let me quote the boy narrator’s own description of this real-life fish in the novel:

“You might not know what a Lion Fish is. That’s because a Lion Fish is really not ordinary. A Lion Fish is an exotic reef fish. It’s about the size of a small football and it looks amazing. It has large quills hanging all over its body which are poisonous. If you even so much as touch one of those sharp quills, you are in agony for a week. Nothing hurts as much as a Lion Fish quill! You never ever want to put your hand in a Lion Fish tank. But my dad wanted a Lion Fish, because it looked so cool in the pet shop, and because it’s great to be able to tell people you’ve actually got a Lion Fish.”

You see what I mean? The whole dramatic atmosphere is heightened simply because the fish is a Lion Fish. The very choice of this real-life creature has handed the story—ready-made as it were—a sense of intrigue, danger and possibility. If I’d chosen a goldfish, it would have done none of these things (no offense to the goldfish). A goldfish wouldn’t have left you wondering, or on edge. It would just have left you yawning. But with a Lion Fish … anything can happen and probably will.

And of course the ten-tonne elephant in the story does a similar job, on an even larger scale. What wonderful possibilities there are with a ten-tonne elephant! In fact, the elephant, I can let you know, becomes a key part of my very crazy novel. I guess the moral for writing these sorts of stories is: choose creatures that will add explosive action to your plot-line. Don’t go tame! Go wild. But I might tell you more about my ten-tonne elephant in another blog.

Writing In Circles

                                                  

This is a little trick I discovered when writing short stories. I haven’t read about it anywhere else, though it wouldn’t surprise me if someone has already described it somewhere because there’s something fairly intuitive about it. In any case, since it seems to help me write successful short stories—such as the cover story “My really big excuse”, about an elephant,pictured above—I thought it was worth sharing with the blogosphere.

The “trick” is this. When you have read right through your newly-drafted story to the last sentence, go back immediatelyand read the beginning of the story. You will probably notice an interesting thing, as I often do. Either the beginning will be totally consistent with the ending—in terms of the “world” you have set out to create—or it won’t. If it is consistent, then it’s a very good sign that you have written a well-controlled and hopefully successful tale. If it isn’t consistent, then it’s a sign that you have drifted as you have written the story. Just how you have drifted will then be a matter for exploration. But the first thing is to feel the jolt, to realise (usually with a considerable sense of disappointment) that the story you’ve just finished doesn’t really fit your starting point. There has been a fracture in the space-time continuum of your created world (so to speak) that betrays its legitimacy and its ultimate believability.

Interestingly, using this little technique seems to help discover the problem much better than simply reading, in a linear fashion, through the story from beginning to end. Reading in a linear fashion may of course give you a certain sense of unease or dissatisfaction, but because the problem is a gradual one as the story progresses, you may not understand why the story is dissatisfying. You need to feel the jolt that comes from suddenly plunging back to the beginning of the story. Then it’s much more obvious that your world has actually shifted, and you can then take steps to track down where you have gone wrong. It could be many things: changes, rather than progression, in mood, character, voice, tone, setting, even genre.

Actually, this “trick” has now become so entrenched in my writing life that I no longer leave it till I’ve finished a whole story. Rather, instead of simply “plunging on” from whatever point I’ve got up to in the writing, I often go back and read the story from the beginning again. In this way, I’m constantly doubling back to my starting point. It means that with each new section of my story I’m more confident that it fits the progression of the whole. I’m “writing in circles”, but it seems to work. And it’s always such a nice feeling when I do finally reach the very end and then read the beginning again, and find that the whole journey of the story has a consistent music to it. It gives me confidence that the new story (like that cover story I showed you right at the beginning) might even get published!

Dr Seuss (for poetic use)

Why is this book one of my favourite kids’ books (If I Ran the Circus by Dr Seuss, pictured)? Partly, I suppose, it was a book I read and adored as a child. In fact, it is still a book I can read with delight, as I did again recently. I love the pushed-to-the-limit imagination of the circus acts. Yet I also love the poetry. The whole book is written in zany rhyming verse. The lines have remained ringing in my ears for decades, not memorised, yet familiar in their patterns and effects. 

When my own picture book in verse was published in 2012 (What’s the Matter, Aunty May?), a couple of reviewers noted the “Seussian” feel of it. I took this as a compliment. But I was also a little mystified. I hadn’t consciously copied Dr Seuss’ style or techniques. So I concluded that Dr Seuss’ influence on me had been more atmospheric. I had absorbed from Dr Seuss—and I suppose from other favourites, such as A.A. Milne and Roald Dahl—a number of “techniques” that ended up becoming almost instinctive.

So it was an interesting exercise when I sat down recently with my copy of If I Ran the Circus and tried to analyse exactly what sort of techniques I might have picked up from Dr Seuss. I found I could identify at least three.

Firstly, Dr Seuss (by the way, his real name was Theodore Seuss Geisel) is almost invariably strict about his poetic rhythms. This means two things. His lines have the right number of syllables for the regular pattern he has chosen. Also, the stresses fall in just the right places. When he uses a word like “remarkable”, which he does in the line, “And you’ll now meet the Foon, The Remarkable Foon”, he places “remarkable” so that it fits exactly into the anapaestic tetrameter rhythmic meter he is using. This means the “-mark-” of “remarkable” is stressed and the pairs of syllables around it are unstressed. And of course he doesn’t do this with just one word, but with every word in the book. Each word is stressed naturally, but it is also exactly placed so that the natural stresses create the right rhythm of da-da-DA da-da-DA da-da-DA da-da-DA.

Secondly, Dr Seuss’ lines rhyme. Like the rhythm, the rhyme sounds natural, not forced. Of course, he is helped by the fact that he is creating imaginary creatures with imaginary names. Thus he can have his Foon rhyming with “moon” in the next line. He simply made up a new word to fit the rhyming word!—but, by putting the known word in the second line, it sounded like an absolutely legitimate rhyme. Of course he also rhymes many couplets without creating newly-coined words. The thing to note here, and I have often noted it too in my own creation of rhyming verse, is that a lot of fairly common words in English have some other fairly common words that rhyme with them. Using these simple words sounds natural and unforced. Thus Dr Seuss has rhyming pairs such as head/said, kind/mind, appears/ears, in/begin etc. By keeping it simple, he manages to create a host of successful and unforced rhyming couplets—a whole book’s worth of them. It is a useful tip to keep in mind. Don’t try to be too sophisticated in your rhymes. Keep it simple.

Thirdly, and this is really the most important point of all, Dr Seuss’ story shines through. The rhythm and rhyme become mere servants of the poet in the overriding aim of creating a fun (in fact, a completely zany) imaginary tale. The precisely-written rhythm and rhyme do work their own magic of course, but it is a secondary magic, a music in the background. The main creative thrust is the story itself, which is why the book ends up being so successful. The reader is transported into another world, with consistent characters and a thoroughly satisfying and ridiculous plot.

What interests me is that I too, pretty much instinctively, used the same “techniques” in What’s the Matter, Aunty May? Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise me. Perhaps there’s something universal about these three “keys”. It’s not that there’s really a formula to creating a successful kids’ tale in rhyme. But there seem to be at least some helpful principles. Yes, by all means, use rhythm (but make sure it is precise and consistent and natural). Yes, by all means, use rhyme (but look especially for the simple, unforced rhyming words). Most of all, try to tell a thoroughly wonderful, imaginative and consistent tale from beginning to end, one that delights you as the writer. Then, there’s a very good chance that it will delight others too.