The Undercover Soundtrack – Diana Stevan

May 25, 2016 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris5 Comments

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 Diana Stevan @DianaStevan

Soundtrack by Janis Joplin, The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Patsy Cline, Gordon Lightfoot, John Denver, Helen Reddy, Andy Williams, William Warfield, Cat Stevens, Johnny Nash

The Rubber Fence was inspired by my work on a psychiatric ward in 1972 and couldn’t have been written without the songs of that time playing in my head.

Inspired by workplace

I had just graduated with a Master of Social Work in 1972. Dedicated and ambitious, I found myself working on a psych. ward where shock treatment was still taking place. Years later, troubled by what I had seen, I wrote The Rubber Fence.

My novel is about a psychiatric intern, Dr Joanna Bereza, who finds herself up against a system as stuck as the people it treats. Assigned two patients, Joanna struggles to keep them from getting shock treatment by an arrogant shrink, who happens to be her supervisor. Complicating matters is Sam, one of her fellow interns, who looks like a rock star and is as loose as she is tight. She can’t help but be attracted to him, especially when her relationship with her husband, Michael, is on shaky ground.

Music that speaks of freedom

Because I wanted to immerse myself in the era and recall the emotions that served as the underpinnings of my story, I played 60s and 70s music with lyrics that spoke of freedom, broken ties, and love outside of marriage.

Music that encouraged breaking free served my writing of both the patients’ stories and Joanna’s. The patients in the story are not only trapped in their own misery but also in a system that doesn’t have time nor often the heart for them. Joanna is trapped in a different way. She’s in a crumbling marriage that she doesn’t know how to fix. And she’s working in a system where she has little control.

With Joanna’s unnerving attraction to Sam and the independence he represented, Janis Joplin’s Me and Bobby McGee came to mind.

The Beatles’ Hey Jude sparked my memory when I wrote a scene that takes place in a city park. It’s where Joanna and her husband see all the hippies on the move across country, having the freedom they both long for. Now, the lyrics of Hey Jude don’t connect directly to what is going on emotionally for Joanna, but it was the song I heard one of the hippies play when I went to that park in the 70s. It brought back the images of all those young people sitting on the grass.

The girls were braless, the shape of their nipples pushing at the rayon fabric of their tie-dyed T-shirts. Peace sign necklaces, long beads, and broad leather wrist wraps signaled the deeper changes ahead.’

Same for music like Simon and Garfunkel’s 59th Street Bridge Song (also known as Feelin Groovy). Hearing that song set the tone for the pub scene, where Joanna goes to relax with her fellow interns. It was also how she needed to feel after struggling with her patients’ progress.

A woman’s plight

And when Joanna worries about her husband Michael and his fidelity, songs Crazy by Patsy Cline, and If You Could Read My Mind by Gordon Lightfoot helped me find both the mood in those settings and Joanna’s internal monologue. It also helped me discover what Michael might’ve been feeling and from that, I could write his behavior and dialogue.

Torn by all that is happening, Joanna’s lost. The lyrics of Helen Reddy’s I Don’t Know How To Love Him speak to that confusion. Not surprisingly, Joanna wants to check out. I’m Leaving On A Jet Plane by John Denver was the perfect song to capture those exit plans and the emotions that drove the arguments leading up to them.

Writing about Joanna’s shattered hopes of a lasting love was also helped by the music from that tragic film Love Story. Where Do I Begin, so beautifully sung by Andy Williams.

As you can imagine, traveling the ups and downs of a relationship with your protagonist, accompanied by music that tugs on the heartstrings, makes for a few tears at the computer.

And for one of Joanna’s patients, Theresa, a young woman, who stopped talking after the birth of her baby, the tune and lyrics of Old Man River, sung by William Warfield, popped into my head when I wrote a group therapy scene. In it, Sam plays the guitar and sings this old lament. Some of the patients join in, but Theresa doesn’t. The significance of the music’s lyrics finds its way into Joanna’s thoughts.

Had Sam consciously chosen this song—one that seemed to speak to Theresa’s condition—or was it one of those synchronous things that happens in life?”

Writing in hope

For the scenes where Joanna begins to see some possibility for change, I used Morning Has Broken by Cat Stevens and I Can See Clearly Now The, The Rain Has Gone by Johnny Nash. These classic hits underlined for me Joanna’s hope for some kind of resolution, for a rainbow promising a better future.

Helen Reddy’s feminist anthem I Am Woman gave me the spark to write the scenes where Joanna takes on the head shrink and the medical establishment (all male) over its indiscriminate use of shock treatment.

As I write this, I’m struck by the power of music to soothe, stir up feelings and generate thought. Thank you, Roz, for suggesting I write this post. Music unleashes that inner world, not only of a writer’s characters, but of the writer herself. And what better way to touch a reader than to expose that underbelly.

Diana Stevan has worked as a clinical social worker, model, professional actress and writer-broadcaster for CBC Television’s Sports Journal in Vancouver, Canada. In later years, she wrote three screenplays, two novels—A Cry From The Deep, a romantic adventure, and The Rubber Fence, psychological fiction—a novelette, The Blue Nightgown—short stories, poetry, a stage play and some children’s books. She’s published articles in newspapers and poetry in a UK journal. She is currently working on her grandmother’s story, set in Russia during World War I. Diana lives on Vancouver Island in British Columbia with her husband, Robert. Find her on her website, Facebook and Twitter @DianaStevan

Undercover Soundtrack

The Undercover Soundtrack – Ryan W Bradley

February 3, 2016 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris2 Comments

Soundtrack by Simon and Garfunkel, Morphine, Ennio Morricone, Sam Elliott

My Little Town

Music unlocks ideas. I love writing beginnings and endings but middles test my patience. Once I know how a story is going to end I just want to be there already, which often results in me taking extended breaks from what I’m working on. I don’t put on certain music trying to coax out the missing puzzle piece, it just happens.

The original version of Nothing but the Dead and Dying was named after a different story in the collection, Glaciers. But sometime into the process of sending the manuscript to agents and editors another book called Glaciers came out and the more attention it got the clearer it became that I would have to change my title.

I was driving home from work listening to Simon and Garfunkel when My Little Town came on. It’s my favorite song of theirs, primarily because of the point where it stops being soft and the music builds aggressively and the lyrics get increasingly dark. Suddenly this little town isn’t idyllic and that’s where it gets good. That’s the meat. I’ve listened to the song hundreds of times, but on one occasion a particular line grabbed me as the title. I reflexively checked the name of the song because I couldn’t believe they hadn’t used it.

If a single phrase could possibly encapsulate the stories I was trying to tell of blue collar people and towns in Alaska, this was it. I instantly knew I had the new title for my book, and subsequently one for a story I’d been working on set in my home town, Wasilla, certainly a town full of bleak desires and dreams.

Like Swimming

One of the bands I revisit most often is Morphine. Their songs are a little bit Beat and a little bit Noir, they are soothing and catchy. And there are more than enough turns of phrase and lyrical tidbits that serve to inspire the writing-minded. Though the story I named after this song shares very little with the song itself, it’s a testament to the power of earworms. Morphine is a band that sticks with you, and those are the bands whose influence becomes invisible over time.

When I worked in the Arctic our job was to be invisible. The goal was that when we finished our projects a stranger wouldn’t be able to tell we had done the work in the first place. This is not so different from how the world around us becomes part of what we create. The music, films, books, and art—not to mention the people and places—that stick with us become a part of what we in turn create. Whether we realize it or not.

The Morricone Factor

Usually my writing is tied to what I was listening to while writing it. But the stories of Nothing but the Dead and Dying are more about what I was not listening to. Because they were written over such a long period of time (roughly six years from the first story to the last), there’s no way to quantify the music that created the fabric of the process. In fact, this book, more than anything else I have written, may show the least musical influence. But like a glacier, what we see on the surface is only a small portrait.

Writing this book was about tone from the very beginning. It was about feel. As soon as I decided to put together a collection of stories about blue collar Alaskans (which was after writing just three or four stories), it was clear that they would be bound by an environment, one far beyond the landscape of the state, deep into the psyche of its inhabitants.

I rarely listen to classical music or music without vocals in general. I need the voices and the words. I need songs that move fast. If you want to know my favorite song on an album it’s usually going to be either the most up-tempo song, or the one that sounds most Beatles-esque. When it comes to classical music one of two exceptions is Ennio Morricone.

Morricone could set a mood with music in his sleep. His film scores create barren landscapes full of violence and loneliness. If I were charged with finding a musical equivalent of my stories, there’s no doubt it would be one of Morricone’s scores (here, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly). I can hear the ominous notes resounding in every sentence, every glimmer of hope a character is given, and the emptiness of the hopes removed.

When a voice is music

Allow me to be a cheater. They may not be songs or albums but voices are musical. They can stick in your head just like songs, they can inspire your imagination, or make you feel any of the emotions a strong note or lyric can.

In the end my writing boils down to a voice and it is that of actor Sam Elliott. I am obsessed with some people’s voices, but none more than his. I hear it in my head when I write. It helps me craft the tone of my sentences. When I revise, I read out loud and I do it in a Sam Elliott impersonation. The words are different in his voice, I experience them in a different way and it affords me a chance to feel them as foreign objects. I am not repeating myself, but removing myself. I am allowed to be some version of an audience.

Ritual and routine

Putting words down on the page, stringing them into semi-coherent sentences and paragraphs is not hard, but it couldn’t possibly be harder. This is why writers have rituals and routines. We find a way to make the writing a little easier and we cling to it. I don’t need to create a mood to write, but what I do need is a key. Music is a key. It can feed an idea or expand it. Music helps me focus, the way that doodling while in a meeting does. People joke about getting their best ideas on the toilet or while in the shower, for me that is, more often than not, listening to music while driving to and from work.
Writing is easy. Until it isn’t. But I’ve found that when I’m the most lost, when I put a story aside and wonder if it’s even solvable, it is a song at some random time and place that will make the pieces come together.

Ryan W. Bradley has pumped gas, painted houses, swept the floor of a mechanic’s shop, worked on a construction crew in the Arctic Circle, fronted a punk band, and more. He now works in marketing for an audiobook publisher. He is the author of eight books, including Code for Failure and Winterswim. His latest book is Nothing but the Dead and Dying, a collection of stories. He received his MFA from Pacific University and lives in Oregon with his wife and two sons. You can find him on his website or stalk him on Twitter: @rwrkb

Undercover Soundtrack

‘When I’m most lost, a song will show the way’ – Ryan W Bradley

February 1, 2016 Roz Morris @Roz_MorrisLeave a comment

My guest this week says that music is the key to most of his work. The title of his short story collection, Nothing But The Dead and Dying, came from a line in a Simon and Garfunkel song. All the stories are bound by the landscape of Alaska, where he worked for a while in a construction crew. Ennio Morricone helped him recreate its barren desolation. And when he’s been stuck on a story, even to the extent of giving up, rescue usually comes in the form of a random piece of music. He is Ryan W Bradley and he’ll be here on Wednesday with his Undercover Soundtrack.

Undercover Soundtrack

The Undercover Soundtrack – John Dutton

February 19, 2014 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris2 Comments

‘Music to find inspired randomness’

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 YA fantasy author John Dutton @JohnBDutton

Soundtrack by Simon and Garfunkel, Blondie, Talking Heads, Arcade Fire, The Beatles

Creating a work of art is usually stochastic; a combination of logical planning and inspired randomness. A novelist needs to wobble across this stochastic tightrope from blank page to finished text.

Ideas

Original, unexpected ideas come from a variety of sources. Dreams, alcohol and drugs fueled writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William S. Boroughs. As for myself (and in the words of the great Meat Loaf) two out of three ain’t bad. The odd pint of Guinness has certainly helped my out of writer’s rut. And so have the even pints. Of course I would never take drugs as they are illegal, but fortunately dreaming is still allowed. I’m currently writing a trilogy of young adult novels like everyone else, and I even woke up one morning with the title of the second novel, Starley’s Rust, in my head.

But there’s another way to get those creative juices flowing, and that’s music. Either melody or lyrics can be inspirational. When I needed to write the introduction of a major character in book one of the trilogy, I was driving one morning with my iPod set to random. A song came on (I honestly don’t remember which one) but it may have been Simon and Garfunkel’s Hazy Shade of Winter. Suddenly the idea came to me to write this character introduction.

The Friday I met Aranara was a cold, cold day. My hometown of Lancaster, Wisconsin is in some kind of microclimate and we rarely got snow, even in the middle of winter, so I wasn’t expecting the betrayal that lurked in the air that early October in New York City.

When I wrote this atmospheric paragraph it was the middle of summer, so it was directly inspired by the song I was listening to. But my aural surroundings have to be just right for it to help my writing. I often write in a particular café here in Montreal where the music is good (in other words, I enjoy the songs they play) and not too loud. When I go to a café closer to home for various reasons I’m quickly reminded how hard it is to get this balance right by the annoying FM pap that blasts every good idea out of my mind before it can reach the keyboard.

Atmosphere for nowhere

Sometimes an entire album can create an atmosphere in your mind that helps you get inside the head of a character you are writing. This was the case for me when I wrote my (as yet unproduced) screenplay Rd 2 Nowhere. Originally inspired by the title of an amazingly atmospheric 1985 hit by the Talking Heads, this movie features a teenage girl who is uprooted from her Montreal home when her mother dies, finding herself in a medium-sized town where nothing much seems to happen. Of course, things do happen! The main character, Jen, is overtaken by grief-fueled ennui, and takes to hanging out with a bunch of kids at a makeshift skate park where an unfinished highway ends abruptly at a river. Her mental state and attitude towards others was perfectly reflected by the music of Arcade Fire’s albums Funeral and The Suburbs. As Jen’s mind found ways to escape her dull everyday reality (her everydull realiday?) I was listening to songs like Neighbourhood 1 (Tunnels) from Funeral and The Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains). It’s not necessarily easy for a male writer in his 40s to get inside the head of a teenage girl, so I’m forever grateful to the helping hand my muse received from my local heroes.

I’m clearly more influenced by the lyrics of rock and pop songs than by classical or jazz music. It’s amazing how a random word in a song can trigger a chain reaction of mental associations.

Start making sense

Sometimes you’re writing something and you hear a song that you can actually incorporate into your work. One of my novels is called The New Sense. It’s an epistemology-themed epistolary mystery (which might explain its failure to attract readers as effectively as a YA fantasy) and one of the main characters claims to have, yes, a new sense that other humans don’t possess. I originally published the novel in the form of a blog, posting it ‘live’ in serial fashion every day or so. Since it deals with the issue of how we know what we think we know to be true, it was very important for me to make the blog as believable as possible. I must have accomplished this, because the fictional writer of the blog soon began to receive emails from real people who thought that she was also real and her story true.

I decided to continue the fiction-reality mashup by creating fictional emails from made-up people to post alongside the real ones. And that’s when I heard the Blondie song (I’m Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear. It contains a line about a person using an extra sense when playing cards. My character actually funds his lifestyle by using his sense to win at cards in the Montreal casino, so I used this line in a fictional reader email.

And sometimes music can be simply a source of fun that gets the mind working and creative juices flowing. I’ve been a fan of both the BBC sci-fi show Doctor Who and popular pop-rock combo The Beatles since I was very young. My commercial writing self has recently been hired to write the new Cirque du Soleil website and I’ve been researching their shows, including one called The Beatles LOVE that is performed permanently in Las Vegas. My sudden re-immersion in the Fab Four’s music combined with Doctor Who’s 50^th anniversary clearly sparked something in a strange corner of my mind, because I came up with the idea to create a Dalek-Beatles mixtape (the Daleks being the Doctor’s arch enemies).

For a day or two I had a permanent semi-smile on my face as I re-imagined Beatles classics as performed by evil Daleks. The resulting mix tape insert card is here for your enjoyment. You may then exterminate it from your mind if you like.

After graduating from film school in London, John emigrated to Montreal in 1987, where he still lives with his two young children and their even younger goldfish. He spent over a decade as a music TV director before moving into the advertising industry as an award-winning copywriter and translator. In parallel to his corporate work, John has written novels, short stories, blogs, screenplays and a stage play. He is currently writing a trilogy of young adult novels under the pen name JB Dutton, the first of which, Silent Symmetry, was published in early 2013 and features neither vampires, zombies nor wizards. John speaks four languages and has been married three times in three different countries in three different decades. Find his blog here, get his Facebook page here, and tweet him as @johnbdutton

Undercover Soundtrack

‘Music to find inspired randomness’ – John Dutton

February 18, 2014 Roz Morris @Roz_MorrisLeave a comment

My guest this week says that when he writes he chooses his aural environment carefully. There’s a cafe in his native Montreal that plays just the right music: not too loud, not too unfamiliar; exactly right for random creative loosening. He attributes one of his major characters to a chance playing of Simon & Garfunkel’s Hazy Shade on Winter while he was driving on a midsummer day – the sudden meteorological transformation was exactly what he needed to start creating this pivotal player. He is YA writer John Dutton, and he’ll be here on Wednesday with his Undercover Soundtrack.

Undercover Soundtrack

The Undercover Soundtrack – Jennie Coughlin

December 21, 2011January 27, 2012 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris11 Comments

‘Rhythm taps into the part of my brain that lets the words flow’

The Undercover Soundtrack is a weekly series by writers who use music as part of their creative process – special pieces that have revealed a character to them, or populated a mysterious place, or enlarged a pivotal moment. This week’s post is by author and journalist Jennie Coughlin @jenniecoughlin

Soundtrack by Simon and Garfunkel, Seal, Greg Laswell, Brian Kirk, Lady Antebellum, John McCutcheon, Stop Making Friends, Missy Higgins

It was almost 15 years ago, as a rookie reporter, that I discovered Simon and Garfunkel’s The Boxer made the words flow on deadline. Even today, when I’m on deadline for my fiction writing I’ll put it on repeat on my iPod.

Music has always been part of my writing toolkit. Since I first joined my parish’s children’s choir in third grade, music has been something I use to connect more deeply in many aspects of my life. When it comes to writing, it’s probably the second most-useful tool in my toolbox.

For the rhythm

Music is versatile. Sometimes I’ll use it for the rhythm, because that taps into the part of my brain that lets the words flow. The Boxer is my go-to song for this, but while drafting the novel I’m in rewrites on, I found Seal’s Amazing helped one day when I was stuck. Greg Laswell’s Off I Go falls into this category, too. My sister maintains that if I were a kid today, I’d be diagnosed with Asperger’s, and this is one of those instances where I agree with her — when I’m using music for its rhythm, I’ll put it on repeat, sometimes for hours if that’s how long I’m writing. I call it my brain’s musical marinade.

I don’t just use repeat for rhythm, either. The revisions I’m working on now involve a lot of tension-building, and I’ve had Brian Kirk’s Vance’s Dossier from the NCIS Score album on repeat. It’s one of the few occasions I’ll use a completely instrumental piece. Probably because of my background in singing, I tend to choose my writing playlist based on song lyrics. But Vance’s Dossier has that creepy “something’s not right” feel I’m trying to thread through the story I’m telling.

It’s a contrast to what I consider my theme song for Exeter, the small town where my series is set: Lady Antebellum’s Hello World. You can see it in the opening of my short story collection Thrown Out: Stories from Exeter as Riordan sits on the porch, enjoying a quiet late summer day. And then a different side later in the book when newcomer Chris has to decide if he can trust people in Exeter not to hurt him in the “broken, like I’m never gonna heal” line:

Joe was still running his mouth as he stood a few feet down the third base line, waiting for a chance to score, but Dan seemed to be ignoring him. Chris felt the tension ease from his shoulders that the impending fight had been so easily defused.

Chris rubbed his hand over the scar on his arm. He was suddenly glad there was no alcohol allowed on school grounds, that the scent of stale beer was only in his head. He pressed his hand onto the warm bleacher, the ridged metal as far from chipped brick as possible.

When I’m trying to get into Riordan’s head, the lawyer/town storyteller, I’ll put on John McCutcheon — his Last First Kiss captures how Riordan feels about his unique relationship with Becca that starts in Thrown Out. When he’s in storytelling mode, it’s McCutcheon’s Greatest Story Never Told.

Lyrics lead to scenes

Because my storytelling is character driven, lyrics often spark thoughts about the characters. The journey of the characters in the novel I’m revising is perfectly captured by Stop Making Friends’s Fear. And when I was honing my writing skills on fanfiction, Missy Higgins’s Where I Stood was the theme song for my first novel-length work. I was three chapters from the end, wrestling with a key scene. And as I listened to the song while working on something else, it clicked. I was trying to write it between the wrong two characters — the ex-lovers — when it needed to be the ex- and the current partner having the conversation. I’d heard the piece a few thousand times at that point, but it wasn’t until my brain had soaked in for that long that the pieces fell into place.

Jennie Coughlin was raised in Franklin, Massachusetts and the author of Thrown Out: Stories from Exeter. Her first short story was the final project for a local history unit in middle school, and it sparked a love of both fiction writing and local history that continues to this day. She graduated from the University of Missouri with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. She has worked as a reporter and editor for community newspapers based in Massachusetts and Virginia. A life of living in small college towns with lots of history and strong arts communities comes through in her stories about Exeter, a small mill town in the Blackstone Valley of Massachusetts. The name is a nod to her hometown’s history, but Exeter isn’t based on Franklin or any of the other small towns she’s lived in — reality in those places is far too unbelievable to make good fiction. Find her on Twitter @jenniecoughlin