Posts Tagged fantasy
The Undercover Soundtrack – Camille Griep
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on April 20, 2016
The Undercover Soundtrack is a series where I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold a moment still to explore its depths. This week my guest is short story writer, cultural magazine editor and speculative fiction author Camille Griep @camillethegriep
Soundtrack by Steely Dan, Amanda McBroom, Esthero, London Grammar, Paul Simon, Jonatha Brooke, Thomas Tallis, Vaughan Williams, Phox, Eliza Carthy, George Michael, Weekend Players, Florence + the Machine, Nick Cave
I have long been an aficionado of the journey (not to be confused with Journey), the treks taken between a home we love and a home we’ve yet to build. I’ve spent countless miles on mountain passes between my Montana birthplace and eventual homes in other parts of the state, to Los Angeles, San Francisco, even northwest Ohio. These places eventually became, and in some cases still are, home.
Journeys are an integral part of the fantasy genre, whether the travels are real or allegory. In my most recent novel, New Charity Blues, I set out to not only examine the pull one feels between an old home and a new one, but the coming of age that accompanies the realization that home is rarely static, and even if it is, the person going there is rarely unchanged from the journey itself.
When I sat down to write this book, a reimagining of the Trojan War, I listened to Steely Dan’s Home at Last on repeat. In New Charity Blues, Syd (aka Cressyda) travels from her home in the ruined City to her hometown, a walled-off bastion of perfection in a world trying to rebuild from a post-pandemic disaster. Once there, she finds herself at odds with her once best friend, the seer Cas (aka Cassandra). Home at Last holds lyrical meaning for both characters, a study of Odysseus, so changed by his journey that he can’t bring himself to disembark his ship. I played it as often as I needed in order to remember the aversion to melding worlds and experiences – a commonality for most of us who eventually leave home.
Home changes, and we ourselves are changed
I also basked in Amanda McBroom’s Dorothy, a song lamenting the Wizard of Oz heroine’s return to Kansas. In some ways, New Charity, the bastion Syd is pushed toward and enveloped in, is a sort of Oz. It’s a self-sustaining community full of safety and secrets. The magic that once imbued the town now protects the water Syd’s City so badly needs. But she’s torn, too. Memories of home, the assurance of love, the temptation of ease gives her pause – which home is home?
Like so many of us from small places, Syd is of two minds about New Charity itself. Listening to Esthero’s Country Living allowed me to remember what it was like to be in a small place, hoping to get out. Syd’s trajectory led her out and up, and, returning, she find New Charity is too narrow and too slow. She misses the sharp angles of the City and the people who had become her family. London Grammar’s Metal & Dust was a beautiful accompaniment to the character’s unrest.
These realisations – the pull between the people Syd loves, the town she once knew, and the City she promised to save were served Paul Simon’s beautifully sad Further to Fly. The song, as well as the pull of the characters, are a clear reminder that, though unrealistic, sometimes, it’s only human to want everything.
Outside the sanctuary
The relationship between best friends Syd and Cas is tested from the moment Syd arrives in New Charity. Cas all at once understands the threat Syd poses to the stasis New Charity has achieved and, at the same time, she begins to think outside the hermetic box of the Sanctuary, a religion devoted to the Spirit of the land headed up by a darkly mysterious Bishop. Though she wants to protect her friend and her home, it seems she cannot do both. She pleads with Syd to consider the consequences of her plans, and I imagine her doing so with Jonatha Brooke’s Because I Told You So playing in the background – a song that soothed me through many a tough conversation over the years.
Unlike Syd, whose circumstances of loss and need accelerated her adulthood, Cas is in some ways still a young girl. We meet her looking out over the green hills of New Charity, reflecting on the horizon. In her head, I imagine the Tallis Fantasia playing, the whole thing, from its beginning so quiet you have to sit next to the speakers to hear it to the heartswell at the eighth minute. I know this because I have felt this same swell for a piece of land, a vista, a connection and I think Cas feels it, too. As Cas falters with her identity – once so closely tied to being a twin, I listened carefully to more lush instrumental brilliance within Laura by Phox and Poor Little Me by Eliza Carthy.
Cas and Syd’s friendship is further displaced by the romance between Cas’s older brother, Troy. In her capacity as prophetess, she can see the beginning of the end, and, if she knew the song, she’d be singing George Michael’s Cowboys and Angels to both her friend and her brother.
As in life, circumstances and characters beyond their control complicate Syd and Cas’s eventual unearthing of the town’s secrets. Syd falls in love and finally allies with Cas. After a night under the stars with Troy, she wakes up knowing what to do. Crafting this scene, I studied the lyrics of Higher Ground by The Weekend Players and Rabbit Heart by Florence + the Machine.
The die is cast for the town of New Charity. In the dark moments, which I’ll not spoil here, Nick Cave’s O’Children guided the necessary tears of both characters and the writer.
I’m thankful for the opportunity to make arts by the grace of other artists like the ones above – and, of course, the countless others. Though we don’t always know whose lives – whose homes – we touch with our art, it is reassuring to know we are always building another space in which to feel free.
Camille Griep is the author of two novels: Letters to Zell (July 2015) and New Charity Blues (April 2016), both from 47North. Her recent short-form work has been featured in Synaesthesia, The Vignette Review, and Under the Gum Tree, among others. She edits the literary magazines Easy Street and The Lascaux Review and lives north of Seattle with her partner Adam and a spoiled bulldog named Dutch. She is agented by Cameron McClure at Donald Maass Literary Agency. Find her on Twitter @camillethegriep or at www.camillegriep.com.
‘To make art by the grace of other artists’ – Camille Griep
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on April 19, 2016
My guest this week has set herself the task of reimagining the Trojan War and she says she couldn’t have done it without music. Her soundtrack has a stirring, epic scale with storming emotional keys, from Florence + the Machine to Thomas Tallis. More intimate pieces by Amanda McBroom and Esthero illuminated the interior lives of her Cressida (renamed Syd) and Cassandra (Cas). She is also a much-decorated writer of short stories and the editor of two cultural journals, Easy Street and The Lascaux Review. Drop by tomorrow for the Undercover Soundtrack of Camille Griep.
The Undercover Soundtrack – Stephen Weinstock
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on October 7, 2015
The Undercover Soundtrack is a series where I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold a moment still to explore its depths. This week my guest is theatre composer and fantasy novelist Stephen Weinstock @s_weinstock
Soundtrack by Fela Kuti, Beach Boys, Alice Coltrane, Benny Goodman, Brian Eno, the Doors, Jack Bruce, George Harrison, Beethoven, David Lang, Adam Guettel
Having marveled each week at how writers use music to flesh out a character or bring emotional life to their work, I feel like a fraud. These authors put on a particular piece to evoke what they write, but that feels like a magical act of synesthesia to me. So why does this poor fraud need music to write? In 2003, Apple introduced iTunes and the computer playlist, and I began my series, 1001, The Reincarnation Chronicles. For each of its 1001 chapters a character recounts a past life story, creating a karmic puzzle for the ten linked souls, the qaraq. The playlist became a writing tool to give me courage for this daunting task.
Concentration
For Book One of the series, The Qaraq, I had to hold a lot in my head as I wrote: introducing ten characters in their present lives in suburban New Jersey, and fitting together the first puzzle pieces of their history. That they all lived as different body parts of a single prehistoric dragonfly is proof enough of the Qaraq’s reincarnations, but when reveal this epiphany?
I need concentration to manage this material. To minimize distracting shifts within my eclectic playlists, I often select long cuts, like Fela Kuti’s half-hour jam Look and Laugh.
My favorite listening process is a ‘contest,’ where I intersperse a playlist with ten recent downloads, then narrow them down to a ‘winner.’ A current winner: The Beach Boys’ gorgeous, new That’s Why God Made the Radio.
But assessing winners while writing requires concentration on the music. I realized one function of my listening is procrastination, re-organizing the next half-hour of songs, or mixing in every Andante from Mozart’s first fifteen symphonies. Perhaps I need distraction from the heady multiple structures. On the other hand, often I don’t notice the music and get on a roll. Deeply meditative pieces help this flow, like Alice Coltrane’s incomparable Journey in Satchidananda.
Energy
The energy of a composition provides another clue to why I listen while creating 1001, The Reincarnation Chronicles. Sometimes I need a perky track for stimulation, like One O’Clock Jump from the famous Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall Concert.
By contrast, in the morning on the train, or after work, I need peace, like the gentle repetition of Brian Eno’s ambient Music for Airports. For my latest book, The Qaraq and the Maya Factor, I contemplated the effect of Maya, the Hindu concept of worldly illusion. Blocked by the trivial details of everyday life, the Qaraq loses its power of memory, the higher awareness of reincarnation. I did not seek music to evoke a meditative mood, but in developing the theme of how Maya hinders and helps, I heard a lot of ragas and minimalist music. An unconscious influence?
Imagination
So I examined if music had an unconscious effect on my work. The Qaraq’s past life tales are full of wild imagination and experimental writing styles. My brain conjures up atomic particles having a love spat, an alien performing arts school where dancers train their nerves rather than their muscles, or an Ice Age tribe that copes by re-configuring the calendar to include three seasons, excluding winter.
I hope music triggers my imagination, and I make quirky selections for my playlists: a rarely heard track from a familiar artist, like Indian Summer by The Doors; a song off the beaten path, like Jack Bruce’s He the Richmond, from his masterful Songs for a Tailor; or hard-to-find gems, like George Harrison’s first film soundtrack, Wonderwall, the Indian collaboration he did during The Beatles.
But if an unconscious process, I may never know if music is the spark.
Comfort
It pains me to think I cannot access music’s emotional depths to deepen my writing. The writing process is painful enough. When I stare into space wondering how the next word will appear, it’s comforting to have music in my ears, like a virtuosic arpeggio from Glenn Gould’s brilliant reading of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto #1 making me think, You can do this!
Despite its fanciful whimsy, The Qaraq and the Maya Factor has emotional moments, which were difficult to write. The Egyptian stories start humorously, with a pyramid tomb salesman, but lead to a terrifying vision of immortality, the dread of living endlessly with no relief from conflict. Can I access the pain of this emotion through music? I sobbed inconsolably when I heard David Lang’s ethereal The Little Match Girl Passion last winter, after seeing homeless people freezing on the sidewalks of New York City.
The beauty of it is a balm while writing, but it can’t make me write better.
A final test
For me, music and text exist on separate levels. The final chapter of The Qaraq and the Maya Factor is like a novella, where all the characters’ present-day dénouements thread through an epic past life tale. The first European translator of The Thousand and One Nights faces a moral crisis whether to fabricate tales to complete all 1001 sections of the collection. A mysterious ally lures him to a secluded chateau, full of cats costumed as fairy tale characters, and guides him to an emotional epiphany.
Playing a tune that always give me shivers, like Come to Jesus, by Richard Rodgers’s grandson, Adam Guettel, might inspire the struggle, the mystery, or the passion of this scene. But I only experience the duet on its own terms; it doesn’t bring the words alive. Am I a lost cause?
Looking back on this chapter, I am pleased with it: the way the Qaraq’s issues reflect the tale (complexity); the misty locale of the magical chateau (energy); the translator’s fantastical epic discovering the Nights (imagination). I feel moved by the impassioned encounter between the translator and his ally. Maybe music did have some psychic influence on the writing when all is said and done.
Stephen Weinstock is the author of 1001: The Reincarnation Chronicles. You can find more information on the series and the upcoming ebook giveaway here . Find Stephen on Facebook. 1001 will be an 11-book series, contain 1001 chapters and past lives, and take the rest of Stephen’s life to complete. Book 2 is here. Musically speaking, Stephen worked for years as a composer in the theatre. He won his 15 minutes of fame for the experimental sound-theatre work Mt. Quad at San Francisco’s Magic Theater, developed and team taught the first curriculum for opera/musical theatre writing at New York University, and created music for dancers at the Martha Graham School of Dance, Juilliard, and LaGuardia Arts HS (the ‘Fame’ School), where he continues to bring young dancers to physical, emotional, and spiritual ecstasy every day. Find him on Twitter as @S_Weinstock.
‘Concentration, energy, imagination, comfort’ – Stephen Weinstock
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on October 5, 2015
My guest this week is another returner to the series, which is rather appropriate as the concern of his book series is reincarnation. He is a composer, pianist and dance accompanist for musical theatre with
The Undercover Soundtrack – Jake Kerr
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on January 14, 2015
‘Music was solace, understanding and escape’
Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold a moment still to explore its depths. This week’s post is by award-winning science fiction author Jake Kerr @jakedfw
Soundtrack by Crosby, Stills and Nash
When I was 10 years old I had two passions in my life: Music and reading. I was never that good at producing music, so I did the next best thing–gathering up all the 45 RPM records I could, stacking them on my cheap plastic phonograph player, grabbing a laundry clip, and then pretending I was a DJ. Similarly, I wasn’t very good at writing, so I would write reviews and commentary about the books I read. I would discuss what I liked about the stories, what the writer did well, and all the things that I didn’t like and how he or she had failed. I would type these up on sheets of paper, staple them together, and then collect them in a drawer.
I wasn’t really a DJ, and I wasn’t really a literary critic. And I definitely wasn’t a musician or a writer.
Such is how dreams are born.
At the age of 27 I was hired to move to Los Angeles to write a column about music and the radio industry. I told all my friends: ‘I’m not really a DJ playing music, and I’m not really a writer or writing about stories, but I have achieved this amazing thing of merging my two dreams into one: I’m writing about music and DJs.’
It took about six years before I realized that this wasn’t really my dream. Music wasn’t something I wanted to do. It was part of who I was. I lived through music, where it would provide me with solace, understanding, and escape. But I didn’t want to actually create it or write about it. I experienced it. It was me. But I needed more from books. I did want to create. I did want to write the books, to tell the stories.
Such is how dreams are formed.
So I live the dream, and I write the stories. But make no mistake: The music is still there. Sometimes it is the soundtrack to what I’m writing, inspiring me even as it sets the tone and attitude of the words forming in my mind. Sometimes it is the source of the scene I’m writing, providing me with raw material that I never would have experienced otherwise. And sometimes it is the story. But the role of music in my dream is always there.
The song is the story
This is happening right now. I am writing a story for the third volume of Hugh Howey and John Joseph Adams’ Apocalypse Triptych. As I began thinking of the story I wanted to write, the song Southern Cross by Crosby, Stills and Nash was playing, and I immediately realized that this particular song was the story. There are lines in that song that are both heartbreaking and yet oddly hopeful. The more I thought about it, the more it integrated with my ideas for this apocalyptic story. It didn’t just set the tone of the story; it was the story.
So I put the song on repeat and started writing. The song, with its gentle rhythms and bittersweet lyrics took me exactly where I wanted to be for my story. The melancholy, the hope, the dream, the freedom—it was all there.
It’s odd. For various rights reasons I couldn’t actually include the song in the story. As a result, no one who reads the story will know of its importance. This is common. For many of us, certainly me, while there is not always this explicit a connection between the music and the words on the page, some kind of connection is always there, and it is powerful. I somehow knew it when I was 10. It just took me many years to understand how to put the pieces together.
After 15 years as a music industry journalist Jake Kerr’s first published story, The Old Equations, was nominated for the Nebula Award from Science Fiction Writers of America and shortlisted for the Theodore Sturgeon and StorySouth Million Writers awards. His stories have subsequently been published in magazines across the world, broadcast in multiple podcasts, and been published in multiple anthologies and year’s best collections. A graduate of Kenyon College, Kerr studied fiction under Ursula K. Le Guin and Peruvian playwright Alonso Alegria. He lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife and three daughters. His debut novel, Tommy Black and the Staff of Light, an adventure story for teen and pre-teen readers was released in 2014. Find him on Facebook, on his website, find more about Tommy Black here, and tweet him as @jakedfw.
‘Music was solace, understanding and escape’ – Jake Kerr
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on January 12, 2015
My guest this week describes a journey – of looking for a life path, of circling around it many times until he found where he was meant to fit. He says he thought he wanted to be a DJ because he loved music, and indeed became a music industry journalist. Then one day he started writing stories – and realised this was how he wanted to use the experiences that music gave him. It was clearly a good move as he has been nominated for the Nebula, the Theodore Sturgeon and StorySouth Million Writers awards. He studied fiction under Ursula K. Le Guin and Peruvian playwright Alonso Alegria and is now contributing to Hugh Howey and John Joseph Adams’s Apocalypse Triptych. He is Jake Kerr and he’ll be here on Wednesday with his Undercover Soundtrack.
The Undercover Soundtrack – Stephen Weinstock
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on November 19, 2014
Hidden forms that tell a story
Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold a moment still to explore its depths. This week my guest is theatre composer and debut fantasy novelist Stephen Weinstock @s_weinstock
Soundtrack by Frank Zappa, Igor Stravinsky, Stephen Sondheim, Alban Berg
I greatly admire Roz Morris’s wonderful combining of writers and their musical minds. I am excited to contribute because I am a composer, pianist, and dance accompanist who crossed over to write a fantasy series called 1001: The Reincarnation Chronicles. Before writing every day, I devise a playlist that is an eclectic mix of styles, and I wanted to explore how this music affects my writing. But no song expresses a character; no instrumental sets a scene in my book. So why listen to music when I write?
From scene to song
Of course music plays a part in Book One of 1001: The Qaraq – a group of souls who travel together from lifetime to lifetime. In each chapter, one of the qaraq members recalls a past life story; the present day action acts as a mainframe to enter into the memory, like the Scheherazade framing tale device in The Thousand and One Nights. Having worked in musical theater, I channel the techniques used for moving from a spoken scene in and out of a song to accomplish this shift. And some of the tales involve music: one character remembers his incarnation as Vaalat, an East African mallet instrument called a xalafon, which transfixes its audience.
On reflection, I realize the main influence music has on my writing is through the idea of hidden forms. As a composer, I love complex structural devices that we don’t hear in the music, but which shape the score. This love inspired me to construct 11 hidden structures that unify the 1001 series. Here are four examples, along with musical samples of corresponding hidden forms.
Past in the present
1. Embedding a past life story into each chapter is not so hidden, but it’s not obvious reading the first book that there will be 1001 chapters and 1001 lifetimes in the series, God help me! Frank Zappa, master musical parodist, loved to embed famous pieces of music into otherwise pop sounding tunes. In Status Back Baby, a bubble-headed high school kid’s lament is interrupted (at 1:27) by an electric quotation of the opening of Stravinsky’s ballet score Petrushka, then, with a cheerleader’s whistle, the jaunty song returns, mocked by the juxtaposition of kitsch and class.
Zappa, an incredible guitar virtuoso, could also be lyrical and breathtaking, with hidden rhythmic complexity, such as the beautiful Watermelon in Easter Hay.
Motifs
2. In a score, motifs or longer melodies can recur in obvious or subtle ways. In Stephen Sondheim’s musical Passion, a motif is varied incessantly, to represent the character Fosca’s obsessive, neurotic nature. In Fosca scene, we first hear it at 2:13, and it then snakes its way throughout the scene. Similarly, for each of my central characters, I reiterate a set of traits, a gesture, and a literary voice in all their incarnations. Ooma, the sexy, troubled present day incarnation of the orgy-driven Queen of the Scheherazade tale, recalls her lifetimes in a haunted stream of consciousness. Sometimes I want these tropes to help identify the central character in the incarnation; sometimes they are hidden and just help me create the character. Sahara, the main character, likes to play with her hair: in 17th Century France, we recognize her as she curls a lock of hair around her finger; but in the Ediacaran Era, she is disguised as a two-inch organism with filaments that wave in the waters on the sea floor.
Hidden forms
3. The great master of the hidden form was Alban Berg, the Viennese composer whose opera Wozzeck rejected conventional structures like arias and duets. Berg composed each scene of this story, about an oppressed soldier who descends into madness, around a particular structure supporting the dramatic action, some old forms like fugue or march, others more abstract, like the inventions of the last act. In Wozzeck, III, 2, when Wozzeck murders his wife Marie, the hidden form of Invention on a Single Tone reveals itself (at 4:45) with a chilling crescendo. In Wozzeck, III, 4, the Invention on a Hexachord accompanies Wozzeck’s drowning (circa 3:00) as the chord washes up and down in the orchestra. Creepy brilliance.
Influenced by Berg’s superimposition of forms onto a narrative, I placed in each past life story a hidden reference to one Arabian Night. The Thousand and One Nights contains parts of stories; remember that Scheherazade interrupts her storytelling every morning to save her head, so each night she tells only part of a tale. In my writing process, I use the Nights references to add local color or suggest a character’s inner thoughts. At times I lift a whole plot line to guide a past life tale: the magical roukh from Sinbad flies in and out of the qaraq’s mythic memories of their lives on the Red Isle.
Backwards
4. Despite Stravinsky’s revolutionary status, he also followed Berg’s lead and used hidden techniques like retrograde, where you take a sequence and use it backwards, or the palindrome, where a sequence is the same forwards and backwards (Madam I’m Adam, or, qaraq!). In his opera The Flood, Stravinsky depicts the deluge structurally as a palindrome (at 2:33): the seas rise with orchestral tremolos for the storm, then the music retrogrades with the receding of the waters. In 1001, the chronological order of the past lives presented in the series is a karmic palindrome. The first 500 lifetimes create issues among the characters, and the last 500 are the karmic consequences, resolved in retrograde order. If the incarnation in lifetime #251 murders incarnation #252, then in lifetime #750, the victim forgives the murderer’s incarnation #751. That’s a hidden form!
If you haven’t stopped reading and called my local asylum to come fetch me immediately, I hope you might be excited to go hunting for hidden forms, or even use them in your work. They help generate ideas you’d never think of otherwise, and at the very least they have a subconscious effect on the reader. Maybe that’s how my daily playlist influences my writing; it’s a hidden form working on a subconscious level. An Undercover Soundtrack!
Stephen Weinstock is the author of 1001: The Reincarnation Chronicles. You can find more information on the series, more articles on writing, music, and reincarnation, and links to online tales here . Find Stephen on Facebook and email: drstephenw@comcast.net. 1001 will be an 11 book series, contain 1001 chapters and past lives, and take the rest of Stephen’s life to complete. Musically speaking, Stephen worked for years as a composer in the theatre. He won his 15 minutes of fame for the experimental sound-theatre work Mt. Quad at San Francisco’s Magic Theater, developed and team taught the first curriculum for opera/musical theatre writing at New York University, and created music for dancers at the Martha Graham School of Dance, Juilliard, and LaGuardia Arts HS (the ‘Fame’ School), where he continues to bring young dancers to physical, emotional, and spiritual ecstasy every day. Find him on Twitter as @S_Weinstock.
SHORT BREAK The Undercover Soundtrack will take a short break but will be back in a couple of weeks.
Hidden forms that tell a story – Stephen Weinstock
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on November 18, 2014
You can’t read much about writing advice before you trip over an essay about story structure, and how it works invisible magic on the reader. My guest this week has used sophisticated musical structures as the skeleton of his fantasy series, a series of nested reincarnation tales inspired by The Thousand and One Nights – and his influences range from Alban Berg to Frank Zappa. For him, music does not so much conjure up a scene or a character as an entire shape, of how an idea moves into a story and where it eventually goes. He is uniquely qualified to do so, as he is a composer, pianist and dance accompanist for musical theatre with (though he has not yet said if he is reincarnated). Stephen Weinstock will be here on Wednesday with his Undercover Soundtrack.
The Undercover Soundtrack – JW Hicks
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Uncategorized on November 5, 2014
‘A lyric; a tune; a fragment; a thrilling chord-run’
Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold a moment still to explore its depths. This week my guest is quirky speculative fiction and award-winning short story writer JW Hicks @TriskeleBooks
Soundtrack by Bedrich Smetana, Aaron Copland, Beth Nielsen Chapman, Tallis Scholars, Alison Krauss, Soggy Bottom Boys, Hans Zimmer, Lisa Gerrard
Most of my better ideas are sparked by music. I have a radio in every room – yes, every room, and a disc player close to where I write. I hear a lyric, a fragment of tune, a thrilling chord-run in a classical piece, and visualise a character, feeling him or her and knowing something of their lives. That exciting moment when ideas come is a buzz that never fails to thrill. My mind is filled with the promise of a story hovering within my grasp and just dying to be told, and I shoot to the moon on an adrenaline high. Who needs drugs if ideas can make you feel like that?
CapturedBut those sparked ideas are will-o’-the wisps; here and gone in an instant. If they’re not captured on paper or tape they’ll fly away – into another writer’s mind perhaps. I know what it’s like to lose an idea and try in vain to recapture it. Lesson learned, I keep a notepad at hand at all times. I’ve even run soaking wet from the bathroom to scribble a few damp sentences on the pad kept on my bedside table. Crazy, I know, but once they take flight, those ideas are lost forever.
When I’m deep in writing mode and the seam runs out, I, like Worzel Gummidge, swap my writing head for a go-do-something-else head. I might clean the cooker, scrub the bathtub, or brush the cat’s black-velvet fur: necessary but easily put-off-able chores. (Have you ever tried brushing an unwilling cat?) As I clean or brush I listen to music suited to the seam that ran dry, hoping it will oil my writing wheels. I look on it as an equation: a good match between music + writing = a satisfying flow of ideas/words. In my case, most often the ploy works, the seam opens and I see my way forward.
Worlds
My debut novel Rats is a book of speculative fiction – SF, Fantasy, Dystopian? All three, if truth be told, but hopefully suitable for both YA and general readers. Rats is a journey from one world to the next – beginning in the future, ending in the past. In one world my protagonist is Bitch Singer – fighting a dictator – guerilla style. In another she is Dorrie Hart, housewife and mother – carer to a speech-impaired child. Which world is real – which life is true? And why does she wake each morning crying for a lost lover – a lover she is determined to find.
Bedrich Smetana’s Vltava, a tone painting used to evoke the sounds of one of Bohemia’s great rivers, is the music that most suits the Wilderness chapters in Rats. Bitch Singer of the Whip Tails dreams of escaping from the Ruins and the rat-hunting troopers. Sharing that dream of freedom, her clan heads for unoccupied territory, the Wilderness, where Dictator Templeton has no sway. For me, that yearning, that dream of freedom is encapsulated in Vltava. In the joy of the river’s run and the surges of gathering strength as it flows through the forest, I am Bit, heading for the Wilderness with her clan. Hearing Vltava places me there, climbing the hills, sleeping in the forests; searching for a refuge where Rats can live free.
Solitude
Music inspires, give impetus, gives insight, but it’s the hard graft of putting words on a page that is the truth of writing. For that I need to be alone and in a quiet place.
Place is all-important. At present I write in a room with a good view of the sky. Living at the top of a hill, my sky is high, wide and handsome. Today it’s cloudy but not flat-dull, just a patchwork of grey clouds ranging from dove to near charcoal. I watch as they thin to expose hazy blue streaks when just an hour ago they had thickened to an indigo frown. Day moods and stormy night moods are stored in my memory, ready to add texture to my prose.
Emotion runs strong in Rats, like the river Vltava.
Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring is an inspiration for forging the clan’s new life in the Wilderness. I love its peace and its joy – the sounds of a new beginning.
For deep emotion I listen to Beth Nielsen Chapman. Sand and Water got me in the mood to write a particularly harrowing scene in Rats, just as Allegri’s soul-quivering Miserere saw Bit through her traumatic journey into the unknown.
It’s not all gloom and sorrow in Rats, Alison Krauss singing Down to the River to Pray helped write the homely scenes where my freed Rats attempt to throw off the pall cast by Templeton. And let’s not forget the Soggy Bottom Boys’ Man of Constant Sorrow that jogged me through Bit’s extraordinary new life.
Last but not least I depended on the music score of Gladiator composed by Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard, to give life to certain action sequences in the novel. In fact the whole CD fits Rats perfectly – death and hunting, a Rat’s life in just three words. I still watch Gladiator, and listen to my CD of the theme music, thinking of my rebellious freedom fighters and especially of Bit, sent unwillingly on a traumatic journey into the unknown.
JW Hicks, a long-time story teller and writer of quirky tales. Her first love is speculative fiction. Her mentors – John Wyndham, Robert A Heinlein and CJ Cherryh. A prize winning short story writer, with success at the Words With Jam ‘first page’ competition, with Rats, her debut novel, now found on Amazon Kindle and Smashwords. She can be found on the Triskele Books Blog.
‘A lyric, a tune fragment, a thrilling chord-run’ – JW Hicks
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on November 4, 2014
My guest this week says that most of her better ideas are sparked by music. She keeps noise-making apparatus at the ready in every room in her house. When she’s stuck she charges up her headphones with inspirational pieces and does a hand-occupying household activity until the ideas return, which usually isn’t long. Quirky and speculative fiction is her milieu, and her short stories have won prizes. Now she’s launching her debut dystopia novel, Rats, with the Triskele books collective. She is JW Hicks and she’ll be here on Wednesday with her Undercover Soundtrack.
In audiobook
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My Memories of a Future Life 