Using music in fiction

When I was eight I loved Madaonna. By the time I was ten, Guns N Roses. By the time I was in my late teens my tastes were varied, but I always fell on the side of metal and rock music and spent many a sweaty night in flea-pit pubs listening to music that only just about qualified to be considered as such. I remember one night in particular. I found myself in a punk gig in Wolverhampton feeling much like what I was listening to wasn't really for me, whether it actually counted as music or not, and that perhaps my ears might start to bleed by the end of the night. Nights like this explain why most questions people ask of me nowadays are met by a polite, 'sorry what did you say?' Tinnitus for four consecutive days does not for good hearing make!

But written questions don't pose the same problem, and considering that I am an author doing interviews whenever I get a chance I get lots of them to answer. There are certain questions that always come up and they are never difficult to answer. What do I need to be able to write? What kind of environment do I like? People like to picture how we as authors get the books written.  The easy answer was always silence. Perhaps years of 'noise' forced me into craving silence. I didn’t care for anything that created it whilst writing. TV or music, radio, chatter. Whatever it was, if it wasn't silence, it was out.

And then I started writing my latest book, and it became pretty evident that music featured heavily. Gregory, one of the characters has a love of classical music, and the importance of this fact is told through his wife's eyes and helps document a complex aspect of their relationship. So after the first scene cropped up with a bit of Rachmaninoff in, I decided it wouldn't be a bad idea to start a YouTube search and check I had got the right piece. It started off as a simple ten second check that I was using the composition that I wanted to, but then I decided to leave that song on to play. It turned out that having the music in the background helped. I had chosen that song for a reason. It had a mood to it, it delivered a certain feeling, and by listening to it I found that I could get into the spirit of the scene with much greater ease. Ultimately by having the music on I found that the emotion that I wanted to create flowed into the writing.

After this first scene I found that I craved the music, and that my prerequisite of silence was suddenly no longer quite so important. I spent time searching through YouTube for the right songs as I was writing different chapters. I wasn't even mentioning the songs in the writing, but just having them on in the background helped the words to flow. One scene I found that I was playing one particular song repeatedly until I got the scene exactly as I wanted it.

So no longer can I answer the question about my writing environment with such flippant ease. It seems that I am learning all the time about what I need in order to get the job done. Just like my tastes in music changed, so do my requirements to be able to write successfully at different stages of my life.  Writing sometimes needs silence and sometimes it needs, well, something else. Right now I am listening to an album from my youth, Megadeth's Youthanasia and wondering how I even considered that writing in silence was the thing I needed for this particular challenge!  I might only be one more riff away from producing a set of metal horns!

What do you need when you write? Has it changed like my needs have?

The Power of Song Lyrics

Even those who are shy to admit it have probably done it. Some of us have grown out of it. I have seen my own father doing it, and many of us love doing it when we get a bit tipsy, especially on holiday when nobody we know will see us.

Singing out loud, be it to yourself, in a mirror with a hairbrush, or a holiday karaoke (guilty of all charges) is something most of us have done at some point in our lives. You might have a song that is guaranteed to get you humming along in the car, singing in the shower, or, when on holiday with a bunch of girls up on the stage belting out Madonna's Vogue. I was a lot younger then, and now I tend to keep the singing between me, the family, and the neighbours. But the one common thread here is not the choice of outlet. It is music. Songs and their lyrics.

I am a member of a great facebook group, and Friday is poetry day. I am no poet, but I like checking in and seeing people's efforts. This week, I started reading one of the poems, and realised that I already knew the words. I couldn't remember from where, but the words were so ingrained in my mind that it took me straight back to my younger days when I was an angry teenager who listened to nothing but Guns and Roses. The song was Civil War, and even without the music the words themselves meant something to me, brought up memories of school camp, first boyfriends, and really bad dress sense.

Yes, the music counts, but now I am thirty two instead of thirteen, those words still take me back to a certain time, a certain feeling. All in the space of six words: Look at your young men fighting. When words are put together well they contain a certain kind of magic. 

But sometimes, even as a writer, there are other people that have already done it so well that it is their words that become a part of my life. Axl Rose's words are my youth, Sylvia Plath's poetry will always take me back to my A-Levels, and John Denver has been immortalised in the memories of my wedding.

So this time I will share another writer's words, and the video link is below if you want to see it exactly as it was intended. But it is not the music that has sunk itself into my life, rather it is the words of this song which will always take me back to an unforgettable moment in my history.

This one's for you bro xx

When you try your best, but you don't succeed
When you get what you want, but not what you need
When you feel so tired, but you can't sleep
Stuck in reverse

And the tears come streaming down your face
When you lose something you can't replace
When you love someone, but it goes to waste
Could it be worse?

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you

And high up above or down below
When you're too in love to let it go
But if you never try you'll never know
Just what you're worth

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you

Tears stream down your face
When you lose something you cannot replace
Tears stream down your face
And I...

Tears stream down your face
I promise you I will learn from my mistakes
Tears stream down your face
And I...

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you