Influence of Prog on Other Arts

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the relationship of music to other art forms, and was wondering whether it might be worth string up a string here. The specific question is this:

For those of you involved in arts other than music, what influence has prog had on the art that you produce?

I’ll start.

I recently finished writing a novel, and for the record, this is not self-promotion: I will not mention the title of the book or my last name. A synopsis is currently sitting on some editor’s desk, and I have no idea how long it will take me to find a publisher. But back the story …

I recently finished writing a novel. When I started writing it, the piece of music most often coming out of my speakers as “Super’s Ready,” and I know the structure of that song influence the structure of the section of the book I was working on. As work progressed, I found myself setting up a few hours worth of albums, mostly early prog, before getting down to writing, and choosing albums I thought would inform the mood and/or structure that I was aiming for. The most frequent fliers were Yes’s Close to the Edge, Relayer, and Keys to Ascension, ELP’s “Tarkus,” Rush’s “2112” and the entirety of A Farewell to Kings, and on the non-pog side, Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony and Shostakovitch’s 7^th (the Leningrad symphony). These works helped me to find the structure I needed, and gave me insights into such things as pacing and relationships between interweaving themes. Then for reasons I need not g into, I stopped writing for about eight years. I also stopped seeking out new-to-me music.

About a year and a half ago, I started exploring music again in a big way, and simultaneously started finding that my writing muscles were getting restless. While listening to Marillion’s Marbles, specifically “Genie”(line: “I’m scared of everything I am …”), I started to address the various reasons why I had stopped writing, and as other music began to find its way in, the stories I wanted to tell started taking shape again in my head. The relationship was so close that I was unable to get back into the eight-year-abandoned novel until, while listening repeatedly to IQ’s Subterranea (hence my avatar), I hit upon a way to weave together all of those things that I’d left hanging. As the last hundred pages came together over summer 2009, the music of IQ, Arena (specifically The Visitor), and Marillion (specifically Marbles and Happiness Is the Road: Essence) gave me the insights I needed. The relationship is so close that I consider the last, fairly long chapter, to be as much prog epic as fantasy fiction. And while this may sound weird, one of the mental adjustments that I had to make to get the project done, was to start thinking of the book as not so much a novel as a prog concept album composed, oddly, by someone who does not play music.

So there’s my story: basically, prog has not only informed my writing, but helped me to recover it and, in doing so, helped me to become a more complete human being. I hope this is not too gushy or personal, and am really interested to see whether others among you also know of close relationships between prog and whatever non-musical art you do.