There are many forms of story, and they’re not all done as text on paper.

Different media use different methods. Sitting around the campfire, you might find yourself waving your hands around to demonstrate the action you’re narrating, or leaning in to simulate emotional reactions.

In conventional text, you are in charge of working with the reader’s own background to convey a story without resorting to bald and lengthy step by step background description. This is done in large part by referencing familiar environments and behaviors, with just enough clues that the reader can construct his own mental images and understanding based on his own knowledge and experience, rather than slogging through settings on overkill level.

Fiction conveyed via text has conventional structures to help contain the needs and movement of a story. A prop that is significant to the story might be mentioned three times casually before its importance becomes clear, so that it doesn’t appear to come out of nowhere but conveys some sense of inevitability. A sub-plot that reveals tension between characters may prove to be an example of the author misleading reader expectations to support a narrative surprise down the line.

You know what other narrative form lends itself to these structures? Instrumental music.

Conjure up some favorite old chestnut of longform (concerto, symphony, etc.) instrumental classical music in your head. You’ll find themes and their variants — once you’ve heard a theme twice (more than “once” is what makes it a theme), you expect it to recur again in variants, weighted with different emotion: triumphant in victory or despondent in catastrophe. The musical themes convey character and situation information much as if the narrator were conveying the action via gesticulations. The sweeping development of the story and what we should feel about it is carried along on the emotion of what we hear about the situation, changed or reinforced with each reinvocation. Was the theme in a minor key? Does the piece end that way or in a triumphant major key? Do the themes develop or wither?

The emotions conjured up by music are as suggestive of narrative feeling for at least the emotions of a story as text or any other communication media. Just as film removes some of the burden of direct description from a story, so does music remove some of the burden of direct emotional demonstration.

I’m a musician in various forms, and I often think of musical beats when I’m constructing emotionally important scenes. The pauses in the emotional reveals, the recurring references to symbolically important themes that repeat but are modified and repurposed in their repeats, the unexpected crashes into despair or ascensions into triumph that are timed as if they were presented on a stage, with room to expand to be fully developed and felt — I use musical expectations and timing to help underline the effects.

I don’t think it’s explicitly detectable to the reader, but anything that makes my stories more solid to me can’t be wrong for my audience.

Do you have any sort of non-text medium that you use to help underpin your story process? How does that work for you?