"When I first started to get into writing, it was via music. I'd generate ideas for songs that would turn into stories, then they'd turn into novels. I was biased toward music"
About this Quote
Creative origin stories usually get cleaned up into something noble: the bookish kid who loved libraries, the young genius struck by a sentence. Irvine Welsh offers a messier, more revealing pipeline: music first, literature second, with storytelling as the afterimage of a beat. The intent is disarmingly practical. He is explaining process, but he is also staking a claim about where narrative energy actually comes from in his work: rhythm, repetition, hooks, the communal charge of a track you feel in your body before you understand it in your head.
The subtext matters because Welsh is a novelist associated with speed, voice, and abrasion. His sentences often behave like riffs: they loop, escalate, cut hard. Saying he was "biased toward music" reads less like a preference than an allegiance. Music is the democratic art form, the one you don’t need permission to enter. That’s a class and access statement hiding in plain sight, especially from a Scottish writer whose most famous characters live closer to clubs and housing schemes than to MFA workshops. Songs become stories because songs are already stories in miniature: character, attitude, conflict, release.
Contextually, Welsh comes out of a culture where youth identity is organized around sound - punk, rave, clubland - and where voice (dialect, slang, the local grain of speech) is political. Starting with music explains why his fiction insists on vernacular authenticity and why it often feels engineered to be heard, not merely read. The line quietly reframes the novel as a remix: long-form narrative built from the same raw material as a banger - mood, momentum, and a willingness to go too far.
The subtext matters because Welsh is a novelist associated with speed, voice, and abrasion. His sentences often behave like riffs: they loop, escalate, cut hard. Saying he was "biased toward music" reads less like a preference than an allegiance. Music is the democratic art form, the one you don’t need permission to enter. That’s a class and access statement hiding in plain sight, especially from a Scottish writer whose most famous characters live closer to clubs and housing schemes than to MFA workshops. Songs become stories because songs are already stories in miniature: character, attitude, conflict, release.
Contextually, Welsh comes out of a culture where youth identity is organized around sound - punk, rave, clubland - and where voice (dialect, slang, the local grain of speech) is political. Starting with music explains why his fiction insists on vernacular authenticity and why it often feels engineered to be heard, not merely read. The line quietly reframes the novel as a remix: long-form narrative built from the same raw material as a banger - mood, momentum, and a willingness to go too far.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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