Singer-songwriter. Novelist. That pretty much says it. One day some years back I had an idea for a novel. Not just a storyline, but a new way to express something. I wanted to combine the form of the literary novel with music. And I didn’t want just to write about music and musicians, a la Thomas Mann and Doctor Faustus, and as many others have done. And I didn’t want to combine a novel with other people’s music.
My idea was to write a story around songs that I had written and would record. The story would be of a group of kids who try to make it in the music business. And I wanted to perform and record the music myself. I wanted to present, like, an intersection of two art forms in a new form in which I was the creator, writer, and performer of all of it. Music and novel merged into one performance if you will.
The idea has led to Fifth Wheel: A Novel with Music, the book I’ve been working on ever since. When I started work on the book, the ability to combine writing and music together into one entity didn’t technically exist. But I knew it would one day, perhaps soon, and I wanted to be ready for the day. Since then we’ve seen the advent of the ebook with audio (in the EPUB-3 format).
But I wasn’t ready to publish at that point, the story wasn’t done, so I kept working. I was terrified that someone, maybe many people, would beat me to the punch. But so far I haven’t seen evidence of a full-length novel combined with the author’s original music into one seamless experience.
When EPUB-3 came out, the major online bookstores began to support it. So, the day is here: I’m on the cusp of releasing Fifth Wheel. The story’s done; the songs are recorded. Because it’s never been done before, and literary agents and publishers don’t know what to make of it, I’m self-publishing the ebook. I hope this is the beginning of a new phase for the novel, in which it expands to cover territory it’s never invaded before.
Gary White is a novelist and musician from Dallas, Texas, where he lives with his wife and their cat, Louis, and dog, Rose.