A MAGICAL REFLECTION

“The idea of being able to skim the prose and see the embedded lyrics surfacing through sentences and paragraphs came very early in the project,” Rich recalls. “I thought there might be magic in that—ways of creating unusual and interesting reflections between the two.”

From early on, he expected to provide the lyrics in print, in addition to the novel text:

“I didn’t want to cripple the music by requiring it to provide all the story detail, and I didn’t want to cripple the prose by requiring it to embed all the lyrics. I liked the idea of excerpting a few of the lyrics exactly as they occur in song, embedding a larger portion in the form of words and phrases in the prose, while still leaving a fair amount of the lyrical content invisible in the novel.”

Rich Shapero

THE POTENTIALS OF INTERSECTION

“I realized early on that it would be a disaster if I got regimented or programmatic about this. The interaction of lyrics and prose needed to be flexible and organic. I wanted to surprise the reader in every song and on every page, and I wanted there to be an internal logic to when and why I chose to reflect a lyric in print. The printed word has a different spelling—there’s a word play that has some meaning at that particular moment. Or, just as the music is heading in one direction, the lyricism vanishes in the novel and what you read sheds a different light on what you’re hearing. I wanted to explore the potentials of the intersection of the two media. I had a lot of fun with that, and it led me places with the story that I would not have gone if I hadn’t been working with both music and prose.”

 

FINISHING THE MONSTER

The music for Wild Animus was always going to be two or three hours long, but the prose was initially going to be only 70 to 80 pages, and was going to be just the story-within-the-story—the ram’s narrative of his pursuit by the wolves and his ascent to the throne of Animus:

“I overwrote that,” Rich says, “and produced a 300-page draft to go along with a 90-minute draft recording of the song cycle. But the whole thing seemed far too crazy for anyone to understand. And that’s where the exhaustion and discouragement set in, and I left Wild Animus for other projects.”

Then, after a passage of years: “I realized that the way to make the story understandable was to turn the written part into a novel, describe what this animal transformation meant in human terms, and embed the ram’s first person narrative in the novel in a time-sliced fashion. That was the key to finishing the monster.”

“I didn’t want to cripple the music by requiring it to provide all the story detail, and I didn’t want to cripple the prose by requiring it to embed all the lyrics.”