I’ve spent much of my life creating music. It’s taught me how to shape feeling through composition, how to translate immediacy into performance, and how to build coherence from fragments in the studio—layer by layer.
But alongside that, after years of collaborating with writers and editors in design and tech, I began to turn toward literary writing as a parallel craft. Not lyrics attached to melody, but words that interrogate ideas with a musical sensibility. This intentional lens as a sort of familiar, and authentic underpinning.
This hasn’t been a pivot, more a continuation, but with different tools. Writing feels like composing and producing, except the material is from a different layer of symbolic meaning. The perspective that sentences carry rhythm, paragraphs hold tone, and revisions unfold like mixing—the process of balancing frequencies, layering details, adding texture and atmosphere.
A large part of this shift has involved reading—much, much more than before. Akin to listening through records, new and old, I’ve found myself drawn into the narratives and emotional landscapes of other writers. Staying grounded in a musical viewpoint helps me keep a kind of altitude—able to observe themes, patterns, and resonance across bodies of work.
Essay writing has become a form of inquiry for me, a way to surface hidden premises and test the scaffolding of certain ideas, similar to improvisational music, testing and applying musical forms. Fiction, in contrast, is closer to songwriting—an emotional rendering of those same questions, but played out inside imagined environments. Framed, given shape and intentional compositional structure.
What has surprised me is how naturally fiction extends the creative process. In the novel I’m now deep into, there’s a character who lives into his late nineties, still learning, still curious. I didn’t create him as an ideal. He genuinely emerged, like how a melody sometimes just… arrives, and hits, and informs the next musical phrasing, and so on. I see now he isn’t a projection of who I am, but of where I’m pointed, drawn into focus.
The Block Universe
This idea—that a character in a novel might already exist in some version of time—isn’t just literary. It aligns with serious work in physics and philosophy. According to Einstein’s relativity, what counts as “now” depends on where you are and how fast you’re moving. Matias Slavov’s “Eternalism and Perspectival Realism about the ‘Now’” argues that under relativity, all times (past, present, future) are equally real—the “now” is perspectival, not absolute.
What matters to me, though, is the implication. For instance: aging might not be about leaving behind, but about tuning into different coordinates within a larger structure already laid out. In this “block universe” model the past still exists; the future is a point we’ve yet to resonate with. In that sense, writing is less invention than detection—stepping into the rooms where stories already dwell. That plausibly gives form to what we call “inspiration” or “flow.” The winds of creative impulse may arise because the ideas—entire constellations of them—already—and have always—existed. What we do through intentional process is navigate the spacetime structure, fall into their resonance, and bring them into our local “now.”
This perspective certainly has implications in my now—turning 54 this week feels like a threshold, but not in the way I expected. I don’t necessarily feel like I’m winding down or losing ground. More a kind of sharpening. Certain things are falling away, yes—professional urgencies, social comparisons, relational distractions—what is revealing itself is more precise and temporal.
Midpoint Perspective
I also acknowledge that one of the necessary underpinnings of much of what I’ve been studying all along is how neuroscience repeatedly echoes and confirms these themes. Around this biological age, the brain becomes more efficient at filtering noise, at choosing what matters. Crystallised intelligence tends to strengthen even as fluid intelligence shifts, giving priority to what’s been built and known. Studies of aging populations suggest the brain is reorganising itself to maintain stable performance even as some “noise” or less relevant connections fade (for example, Tibon et al. 2021). At the same time, research also shows how the brain can adapt—reallocating resources, recruiting alternate pathways, and preserving cognitive function despite the decline in more fluid processes. (Mitchell et al. 2023)
Given all this, I’ve chosen to think of 54 as a precise midpoint. Why not? It’s a thought experiment available to anyone. If I live to 108—and under my current circumstances, that isn’t implausible—then I stand exactly halfway through. Framed this way, the emotional landscape begins to narrow toward what matters. Even as some forms of rapid recall may fade, the capacity to extract patterns, to read emotional tone, to prioritise meaningful experience sharpens. This shift isn’t about decline. It’s about distillation.
If the block universe is even partially true—then the version of me at 108 already exists somewhere in this structure. In this sense, creative writing becomes a form of orientation. A kind of internal resonance mapping. I’m not writing to imagine the future. I’m writing to give this block universe meaning. And that is what the character in my novel is doing—living well into his late nineties, still curious, still searching. And that’s what I hope to do too, for as long as I can. Writing and creative ideation, like aging, becomes less about invention and more about attunement.
Poetic Plausability
Music taught me how to do this. Long before I understood any of these concepts, I was already working with time as a texture—composing with silence, space, recurrence, layering. When I began writing seriously, I was expanding the same act into another dimension of possibility. Where music carries feeling through sound, writing carries it through symbol. But both rely on structure. Both emerge from fragments into coherence.
This block universe feels, to me, not only plausible but poetic. If the future already exists—if meaning is something we tune into rather than chase—then inspiration is no longer such a mystery. It becomes a form of reception. The creative process becomes less a breakthrough, more a soft click into place. Whether composing a piece of music or writing a line of fiction, we no longer need to ask where it comes from, but rather: what part of us is already there?