Posts Tagged serialised fiction
The Undercover Soundtrack – Scott D Southard
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on March 18, 2015
‘Demons, frustrations and betrayal’
Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative process – perhaps to tap into a character, populate a mysterious place, or explore the depths in a pivotal moment. This week’s post is by Scott D Southard @SDSouthard
Soundtrack by Fiona Apple
Music can be like little time capsules. For some, they may return you to younger days, for me they return me to books. Whenever I take on a project, my creative psyche demands that I find the right soundtrack for it. And if I don’t, I might as well kiss that creative spirit goodbye. They flounder, gasping and dying like a fish out of water.
When I began work on my novel Permanent Spring Showers I knew I was doing something a little odd. It was a book very loosely based on a screenplay I had written years earlier, but this was going to be a very different work, not an easy adaptation. Also, I was going to present it chapter by chapter on my site. I liked to call it then a book in real time since you could enjoy the book and witness the creation of it as well. Yet, it was even more than that. Since I wasn’t bogging myself down in thoughts of sales, agents, and publishers, I was opening the door for sheer possibility. I could do anything, only limited by my own imagination.
It was so creatively exhilarating to throw off the shackles that so many of us feel when creating. And, adding in the danger that I could screw it up at any moment (for everyone to see) was just as thrilling. I was playing with literary fire. Luckily, I never felt alone in the flames.
The Muse Behind the Story
Around the time I began work on my little literary experiment, Fiona Apple had released her CD The Idler Wheel…. It’s a different kind of CD for Apple, losing her big production feel that she used to have working with Jon Brion, now simply just a piano and drums. And sometimes the piano is only keeping tempo to her singing. This put her lyrics and voice solely in the front. It gives the album almost the feeling of a therapy session as Apple deals with her demons and frustrations in each song. When she screams, she screams from her soul. You would have to be a cold person indeed not to feel it.
Permanent Spring Showers begins with an affair, a betrayal.
After discovering her husband’s affair, Dr Rebecca Stanley-Wilson has one of her own. The problem is her drunken one-night stand was with an upcoming painter named Vince. That evening inspires one of the greatest works of art, capturing the world’s attention by storm. The book is about each of the people tied to that painting and that spring of its creation. Some are lovers, some are writers, all are a little broken.
Characters breathing in the songs
I see my characters throughout Apple’s CD. Putting on the CD, doesn’t just take me back to when I was writing the work, it reintroduces me to old friends.
Let me give you an example. One character is an experimental author named Jenn Gane. Her dream is to make a new literary genre, and to accomplish that she needs an unsuspecting victim/character. Poor Steve doesn’t realise how much his life and heart is being manipulated by Jenn. Jenn is the song Daredevil with lyrics about taking from others and not worrying at all about the consequences, especially to the other individual
What about the pure creative energy of Vince? For me that is the vibe of the last song Hot Knife. In the song Apple seems to sing about obsession, but the song grows and grows as her voice multiples into different personalities almost all overcome by passions. I like to imagine that is what it is like in Vince’s head when he is creating, with the unrelenting beat of the timpani driving him forever forward.
And listen to that piano line in Left Alone. That right there is the mind of the character of Steve captured in song. In Steve’s story, he came home to find his girlfriend had moved out, leaving the apartment a mess and no note. Finding her and discovering why she left is Steve’s main focus and until it happens he is almost in a panic just like the song. Lost in hopeless and anxious energy.
I could go on and on… The fact is I needed this CD, my book demanded it, and I was lucky to find it.
The unknown soundtrack
I used to dream of the idea of collaborating on a novel with a musician, having a CD to accompany the work, both complementing each other. The funny thing is with Permanent Spring Showers, I seemed to have accomplished that with Fiona Apple. She just has no idea I did. My dream is that someday she will discover the book (and she won’t mind).
Fiona Apple seems to demand your attention throughout her CD, definitely making an album that is never merely background noise. Her heart is in every song, soaring and breaking. I like to think that each of my characters do that as well in Permanent Spring Showers.
Scott D. Southard is the author of A Jane Austen Daydream, Maximilian Standforth and the Case of the Dangerous Dare, My Problem With Doors, Megan, 3 Days in Rome and Me Stuff. His eclectic writing has also found its way into radio, as Scott was the creator of the radio comedy series The Dante Experience. The production was honored with the Golden Headset Award for Best MultiCast Audio and the Silver Ogle Award for Best Fantasy Audio Production. Scott received his Master’s in writing from the University of Southern California. Scott can be found on the internet via his writing blog The Musings & Artful Blunders of Scott D. Southard where he writes on topics ranging from writing, art, books, TV, writing, parenting, life, movies, and writing. He even shares original fiction on the site. Scott is also the fiction book reviewer for WKAR’s daily radio show Current State.
The Undercover Soundtrack – Aaron Sikes
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on March 26, 2014
‘Noir pictures in melody’
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 editor and author Aaron Sikes @SikesAaron
Soundtrack by Joe Satriani, DJ Fact.50, Hans Zimmer, Daft Punk, Adrian Legg
I go for instrumental over vocal music when I write. Spoken or sung lyrics are a distraction. My mind wants to catch the words and hold them long enough to get immersed in the experience of the song. But with orchestral or ambient electronic music, my imagination is free to roam through my story worlds.
My serialized novel, Gods of Chicago, was drafted to the title track of Joe Satriani’s Time Machine. Satch paints pictures with melody, and every one of his songs can bring an image to mind. Listening to Time Machine as I wrote brought to mind scenes of dirigibles soaring overhead while automatons march on the streets below. Radio signals beep and crackle through the air from spires and beacons. Bootleggers’ sedans rumble down back alleys, and my protagonist, a hard-boiled newshawk named Mitchell Brand, races around the city to find the answers nobody else seems to care about. Following on the tail of Time Machine, I happened upon a mind-blowing noir soundtrack by Josh Pfieffer of Vernian Process (DJ Fact.50). The Mixcloud of his DJ set, Noir Jazz and Swing, saw me through first round revisions.
As I moved into deeper revisions, I got turned onto three soundtracks. I started with Hans Zimmer’s score for The Dark Knight. The moody atmospheric quality of the music was a perfect fit for the noir landscape of my story, and the score really helped me get under Brand’s skin a lot better.
In early drafts of the character, I had him as a mashup of Edward R Murrow and Philip Marlowe as played by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. This gave Brand a rough exterior and a hard nose for news, but he lacked depth of feeling, and I couldn’t get into his motivation well enough to fix that problem. Once I had The Dark Knight soundtrack playing in the background, I quickly found Brand’s core as a WWI veteran, and much more than the ronin I’d originally thought him to be. He’s still a man obsessed with truth, but he’s also a would-be father to the three newsboys who answer to him. That puts a softer edge to the character, making him feel more like a real person.
I’ve also written to Zimmer’s score for Inception and Daft Punk’s soundtrack for Tron Legacy, which have been incredible for helping me visualize major action scenes, flight and escape scenes, and moments of peril faced by all the major characters in the story. The ambient symphonic quality of both soundtracks is also responsible for me discovering how much more my supporting cast has to say. Previous drafts were Brand-centric, but now I have two major POV characters in addition to Brand, and each supporting cast member gets a little air time of their own.
Last but not least, when it comes to editing, I change gears and go with Adrian Legg – Guitars and Other Cathedrals. The exacting and fluid brilliance of Legg’s fingerstyle playing calms down all thoughts of action and suspense and puts me right into editor mode, smoothing out clunky prose, fixing typos, and ensuring clarity.
Aaron Sikes has been writing and editing full-time since late 2011. Gods of Chicago is his first full-length novel and he has previously had three stories published in anthologies by independent presses. Find him on Twitter @SikesAaron or visit his website http://www.ajsikes.com. He is also one half of the editing/formatting duo, The Wordwrights, with fellow author Colin F Barnes.
‘Pictures in melody’ – Aaron Sikes
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on March 24, 2014
You could divide my Undercover Soundtrack guests into those who aren’t put off by lyrics and those who are. My guest this week is one of the latter. He says that music with lyrics is too domineering when he’s trying to write – but that orchestral or ambient electronic music sets his imagination free to roam. His novel is a quirky noir of dirigibles, automata, back alleys and a hardboiled hack (the bipedal journalistic sort, not an equine), and his central character was honed by long hours simmering with Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack for The Dark Knight. He is Aaron Sikes and he’ll be here on Wednesday with his Undercover Soundtrack.
The Undercover Soundtrack – Michael Stutz
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on December 5, 2012
‘I knew she and I were both fast nothings forever in the same big lonely dream’
Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative process – perhaps to open a secret channel to understand a character, populate a mysterious place, or explore the depths in a pivotal moment. This week’s guest is Michael Stutz @MichaelStutz
Soundtrack by The Carpenters, Sarah Vaughan and Clifford Brown
Writing and music are together, are one. That’s how it’s always been for me — I started to make music at about the same time I began writing, and in perfect synaesthesia they’re both ways of painting out the colors inside me. I have an acoustic in my workoom and most days, when I get up for a sec from the keyboard, I’ll play it — when you’re working on something that takes years to complete, it’s no small exhilaration to grab a guitar and make a new song in like 48 seconds, which I literally do all the time.
My new book Circuits of the Wind is the story of a life — Ray Valentine, a slacker who grows up online. It’s a big, serious, literary history of the net generation, taking place over three decades — from the 70s through to 2000, which is far enough back to be pretty nostalgic now. There’s plenty of music along the way, but the writing itself’s also directly informed by it – often some piece of popular music will haunt a gestating scene, and in the process of writing I’ll pick up on it.
In the beginning, for instance, about 23 pages in, there’s a scene that goes on for a while in what I call a rhapsodic soundmovie – it’s a sweeping vision of Christmastime and what that means to little Raymond in the suburban America of the 70s and 80s. When preparing to write it I’d recalled The Carpenters’ 1978 version of The Christmas Waltz, a song originally written by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn. I knew that somewhere in that world I was trying to capture, this song was playing — and now when I hear it, I think back to that passage.
I love Karen Carpenter. I love her so much, I mean, man, she could sing — what she and her brother were doing so perfectly well was also anachronistically against the whole hulking motion of postmodern culture, and in that sense is just how I feel about my own place in it now.
Styne and Cahn are among the best of the best of those songwriters that make up what they call the great American songbook — to which I’d include Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini, John Blackburn, Johnny Mandel, Mitchell Parish and two dozen more. This stuff’s in my blood thick and for a long while I thought for sure I was going to be one of those guys, until I realised that I needed to go to an emotional space where songs don’t quite reach, where you need long narrative prose to arrive.
But one piece of music needs to be mentioned because it literally sparked the book. The idea for Circuits of the Wind came to me, complete and whole, while listening to this divine recording of Sarah Vaughan and Clifford Brown’s performance of Lullaby of Birdland, written by George Shearing and George David Weiss.
Something unforgettable happened that night, incredible, that showed me the end of the book and everything that led up to it. It was late and I was alone and it was like the whole world around me melted away — I mean I actually saw this, like Allen Ginsberg’s vision of Blake over Manhattan there was this real, physical, external experience of reality bending right back, and everything melting; even my own heartbeat stopped at one point and I saw that not only was the world a big dream but me too, because I’m in it, and therefore I didn’t hold or own anything, not even myself – when Sarah was scatting in the middle of the track I knew that she and I were both fast nothings forever in the same big lonely dream universe.
To think I’d hoped to look into eternity for so long and here suddenly whoah, I was actually doing it, where now a whole book was neatly laid out for me ready to go. It was originally subtitled ‘a ghost story’, which is probably about as much as I can say without giving it all away, and that’s plenty – because after all what’s writing anyway, but us ghosts in here singing?
Michael Stutz is the author of Circuits of the Wind, published in three volumes (and a single, unabridged Kindle edition). You can sometimes find him on Facebook and, rarely, Twitter.
GIVEAWAY Michael is excited to give away a copy of Circuits of The Wind to anyone who shares this post on Facebook, Google Plus or Twitter – each platform counts as one entry with a maximum of one entry per platform. To let him know, leave a comment here. You can also enter by leaving a comment here! The prize is either a print or an ebook edition – you choose.
‘Somewhere in the world I was trying to capture, this song was playing’ – Michael Stutz
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on December 3, 2012
My guest this week has been noodling with music for as long as he’s wielded words. When he needs a break from the keyboard, he picks up a guitar and plucks a string. He describes his novel as ‘the story of a guy who grows up on line’, a world in which music is an essential part of the landscape, haunting the scenes as they come to life on the page. He first released it as a serial, which means he and I have something in common – indeed he sent me an email that prompted a recent post over on the Purple Blog. He is Michael Stutz, and he’ll be here on Wednesday talking about the Undercover Soundtrack to Circuits of the Wind.
In audiobook
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