"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"
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Creativity often follows the path of least resistance through the senses, and sound is a natural conduit. Songs are tiny stories with hooks, rhythm, and mood compressed into minutes. Starting from music means starting from cadence, from the bodily pull of a beat, and that shapes how language is imagined. Irvine Welsh came of age in the churn of punk and later the ecstasy-era clubs of Edinburgh, where narratives happen on the dance floor and in the aftermath. That environment privileges voice, attitude, and immediacy. It makes sense that ideas first arrived as songs, because a lyric invites a world, a character, a scene; expand the verse and you have a short story; string the stories in a sequence and an album becomes a novel.
The bias toward music is audible in Welshs prose. He writes for the ear as much as the eye, bending grammar to dialect, letting rhythm carry meaning. Dialogue hits like a riff; repetition works like a chorus; sudden swerves resemble a DJ cutting from one track to another. Trainspotting itself reads like a set of overlapping tracks, each voice a different mix, the whole book sequenced for emotional flow rather than tidy plot geometry. That comes from treating narrative as something you can dance to, not just think about. Music also taught economy and punch. A line has to land. A beat has to drop. Even when he expands into a novel, the sentences often keep that compressed, propulsive energy.
There is also a cultural dimension. Music, particularly club culture, offered a communal language for working-class lives that mainstream literature often sidelined. Starting with songs let him smuggle authenticity into longer forms without smoothing out the roughness. He hears characters before he sees them. He samples, remixes, and layers experience, turning subcultural pulse into literary architecture. The pathway from songs to stories to novels is finally a lesson in scale: the same core emotion, stretched or tightened, carried by rhythm all the way through.
The bias toward music is audible in Welshs prose. He writes for the ear as much as the eye, bending grammar to dialect, letting rhythm carry meaning. Dialogue hits like a riff; repetition works like a chorus; sudden swerves resemble a DJ cutting from one track to another. Trainspotting itself reads like a set of overlapping tracks, each voice a different mix, the whole book sequenced for emotional flow rather than tidy plot geometry. That comes from treating narrative as something you can dance to, not just think about. Music also taught economy and punch. A line has to land. A beat has to drop. Even when he expands into a novel, the sentences often keep that compressed, propulsive energy.
There is also a cultural dimension. Music, particularly club culture, offered a communal language for working-class lives that mainstream literature often sidelined. Starting with songs let him smuggle authenticity into longer forms without smoothing out the roughness. He hears characters before he sees them. He samples, remixes, and layers experience, turning subcultural pulse into literary architecture. The pathway from songs to stories to novels is finally a lesson in scale: the same core emotion, stretched or tightened, carried by rhythm all the way through.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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