D. Fierst

As I write this, I’m laid up in bed, thanks to that sneaky little devil called COVID. It’s been days now and being stuck here is pretty awful. But I’m still breathing, sipping tea, binging 80s horror flicks, and going down a Radiohead rabbit hole. Today, I finally moved from lying down to sitting up, and decided to write a bit.

While resting, I picked up Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, thanks to a great recommendation on Instagram. It’s been years since I last read a King novel. Though I’ve read most of his horror stories (many more than once), I’ve never been as drawn to sci-fi. Still, this book felt like it came at just the right time.

There are two key insights from the book that have stuck with me (though it’s packed with much more). These two ideas seem to feed into each other in a circular way, creating a deeper understanding of storytelling.

The first is simple: as a writer, you should focus on telling a story, not just building a plot. Different people might interpret this differently, but for me, it immediately connected to songwriting.

Take a basic song structure: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. No matter how experimental or genre-bending a song might seem, that structure usually exists in some form, or at least as a starting point. It’s the plot—beginning, middle, end; conflict, rising action, resolution.

But just writing to that structure doesn’t make a song. What you write are snippets of inspiration caught on whatever instrument you have in hand. The structure is merely a template, something familiar that helps translate these pieces into a linear, digestible form for the listener.

This ties into to my current Radiohead binge. I recently watched guitarist Ed O’Brien on That Pedal Show (warning: high levels of music nerd stuff). During the conversation, O’Brien shifted from gear talk to songwriting and said something that stuck with me: “Music is the best bullshit detector, and only honesty has a place in songwriting.”

You can write a chord progression and label it as a verse, but as more context and emotion are added, that “verse” might evolve into the chorus—the heart of the song. It becomes clear that’s where it belongs. You can either stick rigidly to the plot or throw it out and let the song shape itself. In essence, you have to let the story or song be what it needs to be, and that requires honesty.

And that is exactly the second point from King’s book: only writing honestly makes for good writing. Clearly great musicians and great writers are on a similar wavelength.

As all of this swirled around in my stuffed-up head, I realized with surprising clarity how it applies to my current work-in-progress, a ghost story called There’s a Ghost Between Us. This approach—letting the story unfold naturally—is something I’ve already been doing, even if I wasn’t fully aware of it.

Sure, I have an outline. The plot is there. But when I sit down to write, it’s not the plot that comes out—it’s the story. The outline is just a map, a guide to help me craft something coherent, but it’s not the story itself. For that, I have to allow the characters, settings, and actions to unfold honestly.

A good example? Even with well-thought-out character profiles, as I was writing, the planned characters of a news reporter and a cameraman had their roles completely switched. Did these changes alter the overall plot? Not really. But did they change the story? Absolutely. The switch felt so natural that abandoning the original plan didn’t even seem like a waste of prep-work.

Allowing myself to write honestly to the story, even if the part I originally wrote to be the “verse” ended up working better as the “pre-chorus,” leads me in the direction that King writes about. And, at least in my book, following examples set out by Stephen King is a pretty good direction to be heading in.

Now, I can’t wait to get back to my home studio and revisit some of the latest songs I’ve been working on. Maybe a few of those characters need to switch places to make for better stories.