Baader Meinhof Effect

Stop-Time, I want to get off

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It’s the Baader Meinhof Effect again. This week I heard a term for the first time, a term that you may already know because you’re smart, but I didn’t because I’d not noticed it before. And then it took me hearing it for the first time twice for it to get in my head.

Stop-Time.

Des Tong mentions this musical term in the deeply interesting interview he did for my 58keys series on YouTube last Wednesday. Then Kirk Hamilton’s Strong Songs podcast spent a sliver under an hour examining Billy Joel’s “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”, and dwelt on it. (Do listen to the whole thing, but stop-time segment comes in from 26’40”.)

You’d think, then, I’d know what it was, at least enough to not ask you to check out Wikipedia’s definition. Well.

So it’s a beat, a particular rhythm that’s different to the rest of a piece of music and it feels as if it’s made that music stop, as if it’s made time stop. I don’t know how a regular beat can do that when it’s a beat, it’s literally a series of sounds that come one after another in time, but it does. In “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”, it comes between one of that song’s many dramatic changes in tempo, even in form, and it’s like it holds you in the air for a moment, just before you drop back down into the time of the song.

There’s a moment in WG Snuffy Walden’s thirtysomething soundtrack where the music pauses for the smallest breath that feels like a chasm. It’s a pause, an ending, yet you know it hasn’t ended, you know you’re falling to the next note and when that comes, it’s like it’s caught you and is bringing you along to something else.

It’s also like I wish I knew any musical terms whatsoever.

Well, I do now, I know stop-time.

And somehow I’m going to use it in my writing. Er. I mean, other than this, writing to you about it.

Change the word

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It’s been Baader Meinhof Effect week. Well, it’s also been the destruction of my beloved captain’s chair, the seat I’ve been in for every book, every script, every article and too many meals. The main metal rod sheared off and sent me tumbling across my office. But while I was lying there with one leg up on my desk and the other in our kitchen, it was the Baader Meinhof Effect that I was thinking about.

The brilliant thing about this is that if you haven’t heard of it before, you will now. That’s what it is. It’s the term for how once you’ve heard of something, you suddenly keep hearing it. I guarantee that you’ll hear it again soon.

What happened is that last week I mentioned typical reactions that writers get. Now, I don’t expect anyone but writers to know or give the slightest damn what writers do or say or experience. But as people stopped me all week to say they’d had exactly those typical reactions, they also told me something that I haven’t been able to stop hearing over and over again.

Writer Jacqui Rowe started it. She told me that she kept hearing of people who dream of being writers, but what they actually dream of is anything but the writing. They dream of the book launches, they dream of celebrity parties, they dream of money.

And as soon as she said that, it seemed as if every time I checked social media, I would see another discussion about writers and our dreams or our motivations.

I get that it would make for a dull dream and a long night if you regularly fantasised about thousands of hours typing. But you’ve got to enjoy those hours because you’re going to have to do them regardless. Maybe enjoy is too simplistic a word because nobody sits here constantly beaming with happiness. But this is what I dreamed of, the writing.

It wasn’t the only thing I dreamed of. I also dreamt of seeing a book of mine in my local library. That wasn’t a long or detailed or even recurring dream because I didn’t really think it was possible. (It was. I did it in 2012, a book of mine is in the Library of Birmingham and any day now I think someone may consider being the first to borrow it.)

I want to suggest to you that this dream, the specific dream of being a writer actually writing, is a kind of pure dream. I definitely want to suggest to you that people who just dream of being a writer at a celebrity party are unlikely to manage it.

But I chiefly want to suggest all this because there is also the question of why in God’s name you, I or anyone, anywhere, ever wants to write. And there I am wondering if I just have a failure of imagination.

Baader Meinhof Effect.

Told you.

For in many of these same online discussions during the week, the same question has been asked and the responses were always what I’d call crazy-ass. Some writers said that they wrote to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. I may have exaggerated a little there, but that was the core of it. The world needs these writers, said these writers.

And maybe it does. It needs something and what it needs, it ain’t getting it from me.

I do write to pay the mortgage, thought not as cynically as that sounds, or actually as effectively. But it is an issue and it has to be. Beyond that, though, my real reason to write is just that I’ve got to find out what happens next.