Now to consider words organised creatively in time

Writing is words organised in time. That must be so because words are created in time, accessed at a time, both in creation and in reception, and reflect the influence of time (for example, historical time, reflecting indicative language use of the moment, and time taken to use them, reflecting choice, accuracy, creativity, and other attendant aspects at least partially related to the time taken to compose sentences, phrases, and so forth).

Music is often defined in a similar way as sound organised in time – in this case referring to the structural conditions of musical composition and performance, how it is delivered to the ear, the mind, the imagination. Music in this sense lives off the page while often being seen on the page. Writing exists on the page (of course using that term ‘the page’ very broadly) and, depending on the form, also off the page. But it is to its on-the-page existence we most often refer when we are talking about ‘writing’. So, for example, if we say after seeing a film that it involved ‘some great writing’ we don’t mean that the lines delivered or the locations chosen or the characters posed together in the shot are the sole evidence of writing; we mean that somewhere someone has possession of a written document, a screenplay.

Writing, thus, is words organised in time in a physical sense as well as in the sense of influence on us and on compositional action. Creative writing, by this logic, is writing organised creatively in time. This creativity, much like the creativity in music, can be reflected in such things (to use terms familiar to those producing and analysing music) as the pitch of a piece of writing, how harmonious it might be; speaking figuratively, its rhythm, whether it is ‘loud’ or ‘soft’; its timbre and its texture. Creative writing is writing organised in time, employing techniques that heighten the imaginative production and influence of the writing, and existing in the primary sense in a physical condition and in a secondary sense in transmission that comes off the page, that connects in a cognitive way with one or more people.

In these ways creative writing and music share some similarities. We might even suggest that what they have in common makes them more alike than, say, creative writing and architecture (where it could be said space overwhelms time. Perhaps too that the literal is more significant than the figurative) or creative writing and film (where, if we can ignore the complex combinatory nature of production and reception, we could say movement makes time fluid and space less definitive than suggested). These comparisons hold together to a degree. But it would be stretching the analysis to suggest that art forms are more different than alike. That general point is not the intended conclusion here. Rather, and simply, it is that being ‘organised in time’ is an intriguing way of exploring the connections between creative writing and music.

What makes this even more interesting, and potentially opens up avenues for greater and more productive investigation, is to turn to the term Ancient Greeks used not for what we would label in the contemporary world as ‘music’ but for what they labelled at their time ‘mousike’. Penelope Murray and Peter Wilson note of mousikē, or the art of The Muses, that:

in its commonest form mousikē represented for the Greeks a seamless complex of instrumental music, poetic word, and co-ordinated physical movement. As such it encompassed a vast array of performances, from small-scale entertainment in the private home to elaborate festivals in which an entire polis was involved. (Murray and Wilson 2004, 1)

Without stretching the music–creative writing analogy disproportionately, suffice it that creative writing likewise is a complexity of physical creations, uses of words, movements determined by form and function, action and reaction. It can indeed also be found in small and large scales, in terms of its production and in terms of its reception. Viewing creative writing not as analogous to music but as analogous to mousikē might make us think not of one aspect of a thing but of many; and, in doing so, recognise that aspects of production and reception that pertain to creative writing are as yet only partly understood and only partly analysed, at best.

I am wary of suggesting too much. Sometimes in the practice, study, and research of creative writing we (I, certainly) become excited about its connections, and perhaps make too much of its characteristics, its actions, its outputs, and what more we might do to explore them. Perhaps the mystery of the imaginative as applied to the use of words, the creativity as influencing written communication, can best be so: mysterious, that is. And yet, without realising it of course, but just as surely, Penelope Murray and Peter Wilson egg me on, and I quote in reply to my own tentativeness this note from their Introduction to their edited Music and the Muses: the Culture of ‘Mousikē’ in the Classical Athenian City (2004):

It (mousikē) also displays a markedly self-reflective element, a concomitant discourse about those practices: thus heroes, gods, and narratives of mousikē always loomed large in the realm of myth, that most malleable form of Greek creative and reflective discourse. (1)

Murray and Wilson suggest that in this way mousikē encapsulated musical practice, exploration, theorising; but also related to both ‘individuals and communities’ (2) and how both understood present and past. Mousikē embraced both the spiritual and the intellectual; society, education, economics, and politics. Not only did (or, perhaps more importantly, does) mousikē better approach the actuality of a human practice rather than a stripped-down version of it (represented by the term ‘music’), it also suggests understanding of that practice is not a separate activity but rather integral to the practice itself. While in my desire not to suggest too much I should probably stop here, perhaps it is productive to end with this question:

As with ‘music’ could it be that with creative writing we too have stripped out much to create a contemporary sense of the practice, and in doing so divided it somewhat from its concomitant discourses?

If so, and here as we are in our twenty-first-century world of connectivity, of layered and multiple points of human contact and human communication, perhaps the time is right to return creative writing to its own version of mousikē. And in doing so, to empower a contemporary creative writing techne. Such a techne, a version of the ancient mousikē, that will be of benefit not only to those of us who practise, research, and study creative writing but also to those individuals and those cultures that embrace creative writing as an essential component of their pasts and as a valuable part of their contemporary lives.