If you're familiar with me as a human, you know how many playlists I make. If you've known me a while, you'll know that used to be mix CDs. If you're familiar with my books and flipped to the pages after the stories end, you'll know I make playlists for just about every character I create. My girlfriend marks the importance of a character on whether or not they have achieved playlist status.
I think I'm blabbing into the void with these things, so it feels like journaling, but I'll write it anyway.
I have an early memory, and based upon the house I am in, I was no more than nine. I have mix CDs my dad helped me make by ripping songs off of Napster. I like to play the mix CDs we made while I play with the dolls I got from Happy Meals, or sometimes my Beanie Babies. I have stories for these dolls and Beanie Babies, usually revolving around romance and girls saving people. (My unicorn Beanie Baby, a girl, always saves my horse Beanie Baby, a boy. They are often engaged or recently married.)
The CDs inform my earliest pieces of writing, and what I consider to be my first book: a fantasy story that I wrote on the family computer. It has since been lost, but the bolero from Moulin Rouge was a popular soundtrack.
In eighth grade, my Nana buys each of us grandkids an iPod Nano. It holds about a hundred songs. I get to expand from CDs that hold, at most, 20 songs. Maybe 22 if the songs are short. I gradute to being able to skip through a respectable list to find the exact right song for the writing project that I have in mind. I often assign chapters of books their own song, which is a habit I continue into my storied fanfiction career.
One of the novels I finished in high school, called It Was Glass, is built around music and different songs, the music taste of the characters being what bonds them together. Because of this book, handwritten across four spiral notebooks, I will never forget songs that may have otherwise been lost in what I refer to as The Great Music Apocalypse of 2011. Our family computer crashed at the same time as my iPod, an upgraded model that could hold thousands of songs. I lost around three thousand music files. To this day, a song in a store surprises me and I think, hey! I used to listen to this song!
For a long time, I stubbornly used what used to be called iTunes, buying my songs and creating my playlists there.
A book is what led to me switch over to Spotify. In Common Strange Behavior, the final battle happens to marching band music. Apple Music did not have the marching band songs I wanted to listen to in order to get into the mood. I make the swap to Spotify, and there I've built a series of long, intense playlists that I can use to be in the mood of every important character that I write. Recently, Matthew Spelling of the Train Track Princes universe joined the team.
Through current platforms, I'm able to share my playlists with strangers the way I used to share mix CDs with all my friends. This makes me almost as happy as people reading the books in the first place.
I'm rambling about this for a lukeroom reason. Today, I decided to mess around with my author profile on Goodreads, and found little automated questions I could answer. One of them was the eternal "How do you handle writer's block?"
I don't get blocked a lot. Maybe almost never. But I'm also always listening to music! I find a new song I can drop into a character's playlist and I can say, hey, here's the shape of their depression. Here are the words they need to overcome it. Here are lyrics that describe their past.
[Spoilers Below]
Matt Spelling began as a Bad Guy. He began as a gender essentialist Christian father, aloof and full of hard edges. As I slid into The Middle of the Knight, the secret middle TTP book, Matt is revealed to be a functional alcoholic who, more often than not, doesn't know what the hell is going on. By This Dissonant Princess, he is divorced, recovering from alcohol addiction, making an effort to support his queer children, relearning how to interact with his inner child, revisiting old dreams, and reconnecting with the queer older sister he failed.
I have music to thank for so much of this. Realizing what hurts he shares with his oldest son Garrett, one half of the Train Track Princes protag, came from listening to Garrett's playlist. Hey, they both wanted to be artists. They were both sensitive and got yelled at to act like men. It happened to Matt, and so it happened again, but it's not over.
[End Spoilers]
Anyway. The point I have is that I highly recommend connecting your music with your writing. Go for a walk, go for a run, get in their heads. The stories will follow.
Comments