Writerly Ways
Apr. 14th, 2013 04:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cornerofmadnessThe power of music for many of us is undeniable. I have friends who must write to music. I’m one of those. Silence is a dead space that rings the creativity out of me. Other friends are the opposite. They embrace the silence and music is too chaotic for their creative process.
Either way, I’m willing to bet most of us use music to write in some manner or other. We might not write to it but we all have probably heard a song and said ‘this is perfect for this character/ship/situation.’ And then we use that song.
I’m not talking using lyrics in your story. That’s a whole other can of worms that gets bandied about on my author’s list often enough. The upshot is you can use precious little without paying for it. No, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking more about the inspiration we find in those lyrics, that guitar riff or that pounding beat. Whenever we hear that song, we can picture a character in our mind or we see a scene. Proof of that is the proliferation of ‘sound tracks’ for our writing.
Fanfiction has a long standing tradition of making FST’s (let’s leave the legalities of that aside for now). In the past, Nano’s site has had space for listing out (but not sharing) your story’s music. Some stories easily garner a sound track like the one I’m working on right now that got file named ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ (one day a REAL title will suggest itself). For Soldiers of the Sun, anything swing works and I can see the boys going to town on the demons they face. Other stories are much harder to classify with music, like ‘Beneath the Torn Sky,’ which maybe because it’s such a fantasy world and harder to relate to.
Let's look at how music affects my writing.
Since I mentioned ‘Behind Blue Eyes,’ let me walk you through how the music inspires the text (and again if you want to read said text, let me know). Kaleo was born into the prison slums. All the worst of humanity (and a few other races) all held together in the harshest places on the planet. Guns N Roses’s “welcome to the Jungle” works beautiful. I hit play here and I can imagine easily the violence Kaleo grew up in. I can imagine the desperation to get out, the joining with one sort of gang to help protect himself and others from the rape gangs that are hardly uncommon.
Kaleo knows his way around a knife. He’s also very athletic so it made sense to give him skills that would work well in the urban wasteland he was living in. While not music, per se, this parkour video does make use of music to add drama to what he’s doing. It’s something I could easily see Kaleo and his gang of friends doing. (Only this is a cleaner place…)
Kaleo lends himself to music much easier than Aneurin does. In fact, the song that is easily his theme song was very easy to find. It encapsulates the roughness of his life and his biting anger at his station which goes from a slum mutt who was free to live in the hellhole he was born into to a Toy fresh from the Toyhouse and given to his master.
And (okay don’t judge me for this one because yeah I KNOW. Also he can’t really dance…) what would be a better song for someone who has been literally neurologically and hormonally re-wired to be a living sex toy after he’s finally released from his training at the Toyhouse after a year of abuse. Kaleo knows what he’s been turned into and it’s this.
Then looking at the video for this, it occurs to me that Adam Lambert IS what I described on the character sheet for Kaleo. Not the Adam with all the makeup and spiked up hair, but the unadorned Adam would be perfect if he had slightly more olive skin and inhuman sapphire slit-pupiled eyes. For reference you can look at this song which would be the end game for Kaleo at the conclusion of the novel. He cannot ever really know if he is attracted to Aneurin for real or is it a result of the wiring in his head. He needs more time to sort it all out but he does know that Aneurin is the best man he’s ever met. All Kaleo wants is to not be a freak any more but the damage done to his brain will never be undone (at least not with their current technology).
As I said Aneurin has defied classification by music. He’s a wealthy scientist, old money. Certainly he could be represented by the symphonic music he loves so much. What was easier to find musical inspiration for was his relationship to Kaleo which is fine since that’s the defining moment of the novel. “Not Strong Enough” by Apocalyptica sums up Aneurin’s torn feelings. He doesn’t want to have a Toy but he’s stuck with Kaleo. He wants to dedicate himself to ending the practice of Toy making and he very much wants to keep his hands off Kaleo. He feels Kaleo is unable to give honest consent. Things do not go as he planned and by the time he realizes he’s falling in love, it’s much too late to do anything about it.
So just a little insight into how music shapes my writing. So how about you?
Either way, I’m willing to bet most of us use music to write in some manner or other. We might not write to it but we all have probably heard a song and said ‘this is perfect for this character/ship/situation.’ And then we use that song.
I’m not talking using lyrics in your story. That’s a whole other can of worms that gets bandied about on my author’s list often enough. The upshot is you can use precious little without paying for it. No, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking more about the inspiration we find in those lyrics, that guitar riff or that pounding beat. Whenever we hear that song, we can picture a character in our mind or we see a scene. Proof of that is the proliferation of ‘sound tracks’ for our writing.
Fanfiction has a long standing tradition of making FST’s (let’s leave the legalities of that aside for now). In the past, Nano’s site has had space for listing out (but not sharing) your story’s music. Some stories easily garner a sound track like the one I’m working on right now that got file named ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ (one day a REAL title will suggest itself). For Soldiers of the Sun, anything swing works and I can see the boys going to town on the demons they face. Other stories are much harder to classify with music, like ‘Beneath the Torn Sky,’ which maybe because it’s such a fantasy world and harder to relate to.
Let's look at how music affects my writing.
Since I mentioned ‘Behind Blue Eyes,’ let me walk you through how the music inspires the text (and again if you want to read said text, let me know). Kaleo was born into the prison slums. All the worst of humanity (and a few other races) all held together in the harshest places on the planet. Guns N Roses’s “welcome to the Jungle” works beautiful. I hit play here and I can imagine easily the violence Kaleo grew up in. I can imagine the desperation to get out, the joining with one sort of gang to help protect himself and others from the rape gangs that are hardly uncommon.
Kaleo knows his way around a knife. He’s also very athletic so it made sense to give him skills that would work well in the urban wasteland he was living in. While not music, per se, this parkour video does make use of music to add drama to what he’s doing. It’s something I could easily see Kaleo and his gang of friends doing. (Only this is a cleaner place…)
Kaleo lends himself to music much easier than Aneurin does. In fact, the song that is easily his theme song was very easy to find. It encapsulates the roughness of his life and his biting anger at his station which goes from a slum mutt who was free to live in the hellhole he was born into to a Toy fresh from the Toyhouse and given to his master.
And (okay don’t judge me for this one because yeah I KNOW. Also he can’t really dance…) what would be a better song for someone who has been literally neurologically and hormonally re-wired to be a living sex toy after he’s finally released from his training at the Toyhouse after a year of abuse. Kaleo knows what he’s been turned into and it’s this.
Then looking at the video for this, it occurs to me that Adam Lambert IS what I described on the character sheet for Kaleo. Not the Adam with all the makeup and spiked up hair, but the unadorned Adam would be perfect if he had slightly more olive skin and inhuman sapphire slit-pupiled eyes. For reference you can look at this song which would be the end game for Kaleo at the conclusion of the novel. He cannot ever really know if he is attracted to Aneurin for real or is it a result of the wiring in his head. He needs more time to sort it all out but he does know that Aneurin is the best man he’s ever met. All Kaleo wants is to not be a freak any more but the damage done to his brain will never be undone (at least not with their current technology).
As I said Aneurin has defied classification by music. He’s a wealthy scientist, old money. Certainly he could be represented by the symphonic music he loves so much. What was easier to find musical inspiration for was his relationship to Kaleo which is fine since that’s the defining moment of the novel. “Not Strong Enough” by Apocalyptica sums up Aneurin’s torn feelings. He doesn’t want to have a Toy but he’s stuck with Kaleo. He wants to dedicate himself to ending the practice of Toy making and he very much wants to keep his hands off Kaleo. He feels Kaleo is unable to give honest consent. Things do not go as he planned and by the time he realizes he’s falling in love, it’s much too late to do anything about it.
So just a little insight into how music shapes my writing. So how about you?
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