Music Is A Lot Like Writing Fiction

Dennis and Dorothy Marino (Latham)
Our Big Band Show features swing, big band, some torch songs, and high quality vocals.


Music Is A Lot Like Writing Fiction

About eighteen months ago I decided to sing again, doing music I wanted to perform. I didn't care that I wouldn't be popular with younger crowds. Our market is the older crowd who remember the music. I blew chances to be a big time singer while a young man. I turned down offers that could have made me rich to stay with a road band because I thought we would make it in Nashville. When that all fell through, my window to the big time had closed and I quit singing for years. Now, I'm going to make the best of the remaining opportunity. My wife has a beautiful voice that is perfect for the difficult songs of singers like Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald. Real vocal talent is something you inherit. It can't be taught, despite what some voice teachers say. They make their living that way. But, you either have it or you don't. You can fine tune your voice, but the basic ability, and the ability to stay in key while maintaining voice control cannot be learned or made to sound natural. The real difficult part about vocals, big band in particular, are the key changes in a song. You have to have the ability to change key on a dime. Most singers can't do this well, which is why the long sliding scale "yeah" and "ooh" sounds are used by many vocalists. They slide into a key change rather than risk making an abrupt key change and missing the mark. I've used it myself when performing blues because blues with sliding scale vocals are the norm.

We have shocked many people by the quality of our performance. Our home base has kind of been a great restaurant/bar named Boswells in Cincinnati. We've managed to pack the place each time we've been there. Until Dorothy retires next year, we will do it part time, performing when we can. We do a lot of private functions in between Boswells gigs. After she retires, we will pursue an agent and travel with our little road crew to far off places. We practice at least an hour each day. I currently perform about 100 songs, including (Sinatra, Bennett, Mathis, Nat King Cole, Brook Benton, Jeffrey Osborne, and Gino Vanelli) among many others. Dorothy does about 50 songs (Peggy Lee, Streisand, Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe, and more), including our duets. We practice delivery and timing each and every day. To excel, you must have discipline. A vocalist should never drink alcohol or do any drugs or smoke, never, especially when performing. A vocalist must practice until the music is second nature. Every move we make has been practiced hundreds of times. This also carries over to writing...

 

I've always written fiction about subjects I wanted to write about versus current trends, which is why I will probably labor forever in the shadow. I came up the hard way on an old typewriter with a ton of Whiteout and carbon copies. I had piles of rejection slips. My first story "Shiny Stones" was published in 1981 in a small press college magazine called Live Writers. The editor, Lupe Gonzalez, said I was a great literary writer. The story is now called "Tracks" in my collection Sudden Victims. It's about innocence and suicide. She was wrong; I'm not a literary writer. I'm genre all the way.

The digital age has been great for creating my big band show because I use digital music instead of trying to find an orchestra. But if I had an orchestra, I wouldn't be able to work because no one could afford us. All of our music is on one tiny HD card, with room to spare. The quality vocals and movements carry the show and make up for the lack of bodies playing instruments on stage. We practiced for an entire year before our first gig. We have been lucky because what we do is not something everyone can do. There are a billion bands and performers, but very few perform the music we have selected. A person can't jump in and do what we do. It's difficult and mistakes can never be glossed over without exposure. You instantly hear what you get, and it had better be good. 

The digital age has not been so good for most pro writers. Basic writing talent is genetic; it can be fine tuned but never taught. It requires discipline. The current market is swamped. Now, due to the various forms of self-publishing, anyone can publish a book without learning writing skills like punctuation, basic editing, or how to tell a story. Some people do not have the genetics or discipline to write. The real pros can get buried and piled in with those lacking basic skills. You can see this daily in the internet news stories: no editing or command of language. I imagine that pretty soon we will all be back to grunts for communication.

Writing genre fiction now is like that sliding scale in music. Many genre writers take the easier road by sliding along. They have the story, but they don't want to use the tools to make the story the best it can be. Or they pad the story to make it longer to fit word requirements. Many people just want to be published and don't care about quality. They never learn that any detail or scene that doesn't move the story forward, through character development or action, needs to be eliminated. They use ! all the time or nouns turned into adverbs for dialogue tags. They have probably never seen a copy of  the writing Bible, The Elements Of Style.  Professionals can suffer in such circumstances because many have been forced to go with smaller publishers and get lost in the surrounding sea of bad writing.


I'm a far better vocalist than a writer, and I have been doing both off and on for 40 years. I've had novels pirated overseas for years. There isn't much I can do about it. I did get paid by a writer who stole one of my stories several years back. In the past few weeks, I've had at least five people tell me they really enjoyed my novella, Bad Night In The Holding Cell.  I had no idea anyone was reading it, and I never check sales figures because my royalty checks have never been anything to write home about.


People ask me if I'm still writing. I have at least seven books going at all times. Some I'll finish and others I won't. I'm concentrating more effort on singing because I've found a niche with little competition, for now. Writing requires the same discipline, but is glutted with people who have no discipline and go about their work of destroying genre. So, for the present I'm sticking more to the road less traveled.