What can writers learn from musicians? Here, Kaylie Saidin explores the links between music and writing including listening, mastering the basics, and developing a willingness to improvise.
In middle school, jazz band was my favorite class, in part because our teacher took the class seriously. He gave us homework: Every week, we received the lead sheet to a jazz standard. We went home and transposed that standard to our instrument and learned to play it. We were also given a playlist of ten different versions of the song played by different famous jazz artists. We had a listening test on Fridays where the teacher played different sections of the songs and the students identified who the artist was. To study, my friends and I would meet up after school, lay on our backs on a shaggy bedroom carpet, close our eyes, and listen to each track. We called this “deep listening.” To this day, I still deep listen.
In the years that followed, I played the bass in my high school big band and jazz combo, several university or community center youth arts programs, the pit orchestra for a musical, and a variety of informal groups that were basically just my friends and me jamming, sometimes with an audience and sometimes just in my living room.
Jazz is unlike any other musical genre in that it exists at an axis of musical complexity and improvisation. It requires a relatively high base level knowledge of music theory—the ability to not only read music well but to sight read (i.e., play a melody while reading it for the first time), and often the ability to transpose chords quickly when gigging. Yet unlike classical music, it doesn’t require laborious learning to play the correct notes and rhythms for a song. In jazz, there are no correct notes beyond what sounds good within the framework of chord changes. And even that framework, in the right moments, can be altered.
When a small group of jazz musicians play a gig together—say, a trio, or a quintet—they don’t even need to practice beforehand. The expectation is that they all have a working knowledge of jazz standards, and they call the tunes in the moment. Sometimes, a musician will do a rendition of a standard that is almost unrecognizable from the original melody. As a bassist, very few basslines were ever prewritten for standards (and if they were, it wasn’t absolutely necessary to follow them).
In high school, I learned to “walk” a bassline, meaning I played swung quarter notes and followed the chord changes. I would improvise to meet the feel of the rest of the group: the chords the pianist was playing, the notes the trombonist might focus on. It was a way of communicating with each other, but also a way of expressing myself creatively within the constraints of the chords.
The way I played jazz solos was a lot like the process I use now to write a short story. I would follow the chord changes the same way I follow the natural movement of a plot’s rising action and tension. But within that natural movement, I played whatever notes came to me based on what I heard going on around me. Similar to music, the emotional vibrations of my environment inform the words I put on the page. When I’m writing, I don’t think about what might come next in a sentence, or even in the plot—it flows out of me, similar to musical notes, once I’ve entered the headspace of experimentation.
The framework of the existing song is applied to the individual freedom a musician takes. You exist within a form, which you can study precisely, but you can expand beyond it and do something totally new—in jazz, you’re expected to. A jazz musician is not really playing jazz until they solo, until they make things up as they go along. Writing is all about soloing within the constraints of a form: taking an existent story structure, plot arc, or literary tradition and finding personal voice within it. And when one excels at the craft, they can compose and create entirely new forms of their own.
Many writers have been influenced by jazz. I grew up in the San Francisco area and frequented City Lights books, where the connection between the Beat Generation and jazz was displayed on the walls. The Harlem Renaissance writers worked alongside the jazz scene, and the artistry in both reflected the cultural explosion of Black artists that responded to and challenged societal inequality. Haruki Murakami once owned a jazz club in Tokyo called Peter Cat. “Practically everything I learned about writing, I learned from music,” he said. “The part I like best [is] free improvisation. Through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow.”
The cultural relationship between jazz and literature was clear to me as a teenager, especially in the context of the twentieth century American landscape, which was most of what we were studying in school. What was yet unknown to me was the ways that jazz, on a technical and music theory level, would wholly shape my writing processes and style.
The pianist Bill Evans reportedly said that “there are no wrong notes, only wrong resolutions.” In music, resolution means to move from a dissonant sound—one that is tense or unstable—to a consonant sound in order to bring it “home.” Ending a song on a dissonant chord or interval would sound strange to any listener, which is why it’s rarely done. Similarly, the resolution or denouement in literature provides closure to the tensions that were created throughout the plot. The lack of a resolution, even if it’s a sad or undesirable one, is dissatisfying to many readers the same way an unresolved chord progression is.
Still, an ambiguous ending doesn’t necessarily mean the resolution is wrong. Billy Strayhorn’s ballad “Lush Life” is full of nonlinear harmonic resolutions and concludes with a major seventh chord that leaves the listener feeling melancholic and meandering. The ending of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel My Cousin Rachel doesn’t reveal if Rachel is guilty or innocent; nevertheless, the story is complete.
When you play a note that doesn’t fit into the existing framework of a song, the most important thing is what you do next: how you musically resolve that note. When writing, we sometimes get the urge to turn a form upside down: to introduce speculative elements midway through, to reveal the twist in the beginning rather than the end, to make the archetypal first girl in the horror film become the final girl. There is no wrong deviation of a story; there is only the necessity to resolve it.
For a long time, I felt like my personal history with jazz was unresolved. This was for many complicated reasons, but mostly, it was simply because I stopped playing jazz. Later in high school, my interests drifted more towards contemporary alternative music styles—I was in an all-girl punk rock band—and while my jazz friends were auditioning for Julliard and Oberlin and New School, I ended up pursuing a degree in English Literature.
Now, though, I see that the narrative thread of jazz did resolve for me: It fused into the melody of my creative life. Jazz created a domino effect that shaped my literary interests, and it informed my writing process entirely. I went to college at Loyola University in New Orleans, a city I first fell in love with because of its jazz history. I can trace back my literary influences to the Southern literature and traditions I was exposed to there, just as I can trace my writing process back to playing jazz.
Trumpeter Miles Davis once said: “Man, it takes a long time to sound like yourself.” This sentiment is true for writers; it takes years of emulation, study, and endless drafts to find your own voice. I’m still in the process of finding mine, but jazz gave me the tools and mindset to explore my own artistry. Because of jazz, I’m unafraid to throw things at the wall and see what sticks. Without any sheet music to follow and only the loose feel of chords, one has to improvise. To improvise in writing—to really let go and play by feeling—is to sound like yourself.
by Kaylie Saidin
Kaylie Saidin is a North Carolina based writer. She holds an MFA in Fiction from UNC Wilmington, where she served as Fiction Coeditor at Ecotone Magazine. She was a finalist for the 2025 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, Prairie Schooner, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere.