In this episode of The Writing Coach podcast, writing coach Kevin T. Johns explains the excitement art can provide and the joy literature can bring to a reader’s life.
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The Writing Coach Episode #168 Show Notes
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The Writing Coach Episode #168 Transcript
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Hello, beloved listeners and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always, writing coach Kevin T. John’s here.
If you are new to the program, I want you to head over to www.kevintjohns.com and click the link at the top that says “free book.” I’ve got a free book for you called Novel Advice: Motivation, Inspiration, and Creative Writing Tips for Aspiring Authors. Head over there and get that book. It’s on me.
Now on today’s podcast, I want to talk about what number of things. Mostly I want to talk about Amyl and the Sniffers, this band, because I’m so excited about them. And it’s about art, it’s ultimately about art. So bear with me here, writers; if I spend a bit of time talking about music and other things, it all comes back to writing and art.
Something about me personally is every once in a while in my life I discover an artist—it could be a writer, it could be a filmmaker, it could be a band—and for some reason, it just lights me up. I feel like it exists just for me and like every fiber of my body loves it. And often, it’s right away. It’s not very often, I learn to love something and then get excited about it. There’s this specific, obsessive excitement that certain pieces of art stimulate in me, and that instantly do it. They just strike me as amazing from the second I see it.
Recently, I’ve been listening or watching interviews by the music journalist Nardwuar. If you’re a Canadian listening to this, you almost certainly know who Nardwuar. For our American or European friends, Nardwuar is a music journalist based in Vancouver, Canada. He has a very unique persona. I don’t know how much of it is him and how much is a character he’s playing, but he wears kind of unique clothing and speaks in interesting ways, and does his interviews in that style. He comes across as really goofy and silly—he’s got a funny voice and wears funny clothes—but he also obsessively researches and prepares for his interview. As a result during his interviews, he’s constantly blowing people away by bringing up things like something that happened to the musician in high school and that the musician themselves haven’t thought about for 30 years, and yet, Nardwuar and his team were able to kind of dig up these interesting nuggets. They make for fascinating interviews. Nardwuar also brings presents for his interviewees and he gives them presents based on things that they would like and then gets them to talk about that.
Anyway, I really enjoy Nardwuar’s interviews, and what I’ve been doing lately is I’ll just watch a random interview and then I’ll go check out the band. I try to look for interviews with bands I’m not familiar with or that I don’t know very well. I watch the interview, and if they seem like cool, interesting people, I’ll then head over to YouTube and look up one of their songs and watch a music video.
I’ve been doing that for a little while and found some interesting bands or stuff, but nothing really all that exciting.
I saw him interviewing this band Amyl and the Sniffers from Australia, that I didn’t know. They seemed like fun people. They had mullets and interesting haircuts. They just seemed like cool, kind of punk rock people. My kind of people. I headed over to YouTube, and I looked up Amyl and the Sniffers, and the song “Guided by Angels” was the first song to come up. It was the music video for that song.
I clicked play, and it’s a bit of a cinematic opening. It’s one of these music videos where we have some silence before the song actually starts, where we have some diegetic sound. In this case, it’s some people getting into a car and then starting up the car. And then once the car starts moving, the drums and the bass kick in.
Instantly, I was like, “That’s my sound!” It was just the drums and the bass, and already I could tell it was something special. Even though they were playing a really simple riff, my attention was caught, and I was like, “Ohhhhh, what’s this?” Then the vocals and the guitar kick in and it’s amazing. I just absolutely love the song. I love the vocals, the guitar sounds great and garagey. I love the lyrics, love everything, and the video is amazing.
The band has three musicians, a bass player, a guitarist and a drummer, and then a lead singer. And throughout the video, the lead singer is just dancing her head off, singing her head off, and going nuts. By contrast, the rest of the band is just got them standing there, sometimes having like discussions in the background, and it’s such an amazing contrast. Someone in the comments posted “This is what it’s like if you do cocaine when all your friends are smoking weed.” That was their description of the video, and it’s pretty apropos.
The song includes the lyrics, “Energy, good energy, bad energy, I’ve got plenty of energy,” so it kind of seems appropriate that she, the singer, is showing a heck of a lot of energy in the video since they she touches on that in the song lyrics.
All of which is to say, it lit a fire within me. I just absolutely loved this band, loved the song, loved the video. I emailed it to half a dozen people and said, “You gotta check this out!” Then I went and listened to more songs from the band, and all of their songs were good. They were a solid band. It wasn’t some one-hit wonder thing. They’re really consistent in their sound. It’s this punk rock garage sound that I just absolutely love.
Then I went and I watched a few concerts of theirs. I love watching live bands are love watching bands play live. There’s a rawness to the songs, the kind of unproduced nature of them. And I often find I actually like live versions better. It goes back to something I talked about a lot on this podcast about ragged edges and the punk rock aesthetic. This idea that sometimes things are more interesting when they’re not perfect.
I’ve had the experience maybe a dozen times in my life, where I discover an artist, and it just lights me up. It’s one of the best feelings in the world. It really makes me want to live. In fact, here’s a story I’ve told many times, so I won’t tell it here. But I’ll summarize: basically, at one point in my life, I was very sick with pneumonia and very depressed, and kind of doing some suicidal ideation. I turned on the television, and I saw this band Tegan and Sara perform a song. And it made me want to live, it made me want to live and I call them my “pneumonia angels.”
It’s a similar thing here, this feeling that when I experience art that I truly love, it makes me want to live. When life seems dull, or when life seems boring, or when it seems like you’ve done it all or seen it all before, and then you find this new work of art, it makes everything feel new and fresh and revitalized.
Art makes life better.
That’s why I’m a writing coach. I want to improve the world through art.
Certainly, I try to do that through my own art. I try to write books that hopefully touch people the way Amyl and the Sniffers “Guided by Angels” touched me. But the thing is, if I’m a coach, it’s not just my books going out into the world. It’s the books of all the writers that I work with. And I can actually multiply my artistic impact tenfold or at least multiply my potential of helping give someone that feeling that I love so much. That feeling of experiencing a work of art that you’ve never experienced before and giving people that excitement and the joy to live that Amyl and the Sniffers gave me, or the feeling I got when I discovered David Lynch films as a young man, or when I discovered Virginia Woolf literature for the first time, or when I read my first Alan Moore comic books.
I feel so grateful to all of these artists who have improved my life in so many ways, and so that’s the project that I see me and my clients on. We are on this project of expressing ourselves artistically, but, more important in my mind, is really giving the reader that excitement, giving the person that feeling of “Wow, this story was incredible! I have to tell all my friends about it. I’ve got to keep living so that I can read the next one from this author.”
Warren Ellis is a comic book writer. In his newsletter this week, he was talking about “algorithmic culture.” It’s really interesting because ten years ago, social media was just beginning, the internet was wide open, and we were talking a lot about micro-cultures. We were talking about how, now that we don’t have mainstream television and mainstream culture being shoved down our throats, the internet has opened us up to micro-cultures. No matter what kind of weird little thing you’re into, you can find other people who are also into it and you can create a tribe. It was thought that the internet and that social media was really deconstructing mono-culture.
Now, the years later, what Warren Ellis was calling the “algorithm culture” has really brought us back to the monoculture where, thanks to social media algorithms, the same things get recommended again, and again and again.
I heard something like five of the top ten songs at one point this year, on the top 10 Billboard charts or whatever, were by Taylor Swift. A single artist had half the top ten songs. Is that because she’s really that great? Or is that because Tik Tok and Facebook and Twitter and the internet have shoved her down everyone’s throats?
In a world where you can’t hear anything but Taylor Swift, and in a world where all Disney makes is live-action remakes of their old films, it’s really artistically an extremely dull time. That’s all the more reason for writers to create new, interesting stuff, so that we can get that excitement back.
I took my daughter on her birthday to see The Little Mermaid remake. We went, and we saw it, and it was fine. But did it light a fire in me? Did it light a fire in her? No, we’d seen it all before, right?
It’s just there’s a dullness and a boring monotony to the algorithmic culture that we are in right now. So let’s break through that. Let’s write interesting stories. Let’s create art that speaks to people and gives them a reason to want to be alive. Because I’m sorry, but the sixth hit single this month from Taylor Swift is not going to get me wanting to get out of bed in the morning.
But you know what might?
Your book, your novel novella, your lyrics, if you’re listening to this and you’re a writer, I want you to get your words into the world so that I or someone else out there can get excited about your words and your story and not have to go just watch another Disney animated film remade into live action.
Now, if you’re interested in getting help doing that, if you want support from a writing coach like myself and a community of authors to help you get your work done, head on over to www.kevintjohns.com/firstdraft.
First Draft is my group coaching program focused on helping authors get an incredible first draft of their book done in six months or less. It has over twenty training courses for authors. It has a group forum where we chat and support one another. We have weekly question-and-answer live coaching calls, and we have weekly hotseats.
There is so much going on First Draft and the people in that program are partaking in the project that we have talked about on the podcast today. They are making art, they’re not talking about it. They’re not doing it in their spare time, or maybe when they feel like it, or when they feel inspired. No, they’re actively working to create a culture and to fight back against monoculture and to give people something to be excited about.
I’d love for you to be a part of that. Check it out.
That’s it for this episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. I will see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
