Music and Story by Claire Fayers

 Do you write to music? 

Generally I don't - I find that either the music is intrusive and I can't settle to write, or I just don't hear it. I attempted a playlist for my new book, Tapper Watson and the Quest for the Nemo Machine. It was a collection of sci-fi film scores and jazz and I'm not sure it inspired any ideas.

But last Saturday I hosted a writing get together for some of my critique group and friends and, led by one of our new members, we kicked off the day with a session on using music as inspiration. The chosen song was Show Yourself from Frozen 2.

I'm not a Disney fan and I'd never heard the song before but it was interesting to see how different people responded to it. I picked up on some of the imagery in the lyrics (fortress, secrets, river of memories) and started a fairytale. Other people wrote poems or connected the song to their current works in progress. One person hated the song and sat with gritted teeth unable to imagine anything.

Fortunately, lunch followed.

I'm very used to doing this the other way round. When learning a new piece of music, I'll always think about what story I'm telling.

This one for example:

We are in a grim castle. Young Igor is sweeping dust bunnies from the floor, dreaming of a better life. In bursts the sorceress and berates him for not working harder. He manages to calm her but she keeps coming back, all bluster and threats. Finally she pretends to relent and sings sarcastically that she'd never hurt him. She takes up her wand to obliterate him, but he grabs it, she explodes and Igor and the dust bunnies dance in triumph.

Or this:

I have two competing storylines for this. The first one is a family sitting exhausted on a hot afternoon when two children burst in. One of the uncles jumps up and plays with them before they run off again. He sinks back down, but now he sings a counter-melody to the children's songs.

In the second storyline, two boatsmen are rowing slowing along a wide river, calling to each other in song, while the river takes them through a carnival parade with fireworks and back on into the peace of the night.

Maybe one of these will create a different story for you, or maybe you have different playlists to inspire your writing. Or maybe you hate the whole idea and have to write in silence. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Tapper Watson and the Quest for the Nemo Machine by Claire Fayers will be out in September.

www.clairefayers.com

SOUNDING OFF - OR ON? by Penny Dolan

The first of December, and my mind is full of music. After no live music for ages, three events come along almost at once. Must be the season.

                            

All the evenings are different, in style and in location. The first was the twelve-piece folk band Bellowhead bringing their magnificent Broadside Album Anniversary Concert to our local Conference Centre. The second, Frost*, was a four-piece prog-rock band, who noodled impressively at a rambling social club in a run-down area of Leeds while the third is a duo: the cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason and pianist/collaborator Harry Baker, with a mix of folk, jazz and classical piece, in a trendy bar beside Leeds College of Music.

So much music, so close together. The host of sounds and songs floating through my head will take a while to separate and settle and so I am glad I have this post to write today. 

Doing any “real writing” when music is playing is almost impossible. I need to hear the sounds of the words in my head, to listen to the cadences and the patterns, to the rhythm and flow. I like working in silence in a place of peace and quiet, where anything that happens is on the page or screen, not in the living space around me. Such a silence is, I know, an impossible luxury for many.  Also, if something unexpected is happening, or someone is about, I really do want to know. Is this a basic insecurity or the effect of too many scary books and movies? I like silence.

On the other hand, some writers seem to need music for the work to happen. They love having sound about them. They have favourite musicians and pieces that inspire them, that sets the writing mood. I have heard writers talk about create playlists for a specific project, of choosing tracks to match the themes, characters or period of their story and seen that it is clearly an essential part of their creative process.

Does the music create the right mood to begin work or do the sounds act as aural guidelines while they work, or do both purposes become one?

Of course, music can also have a very practical purpose. Music creates a wall of sound or auditory block between the writer, writing, and the real life happening beyond that circumference. Music acts as if it can protect the writer from all the uncomfortable demands and surprises that affect the flow of ideas., allowing them to escape into their own thought and process. Ah, the blessed power of modern headphones . . .

                                       

Then there’s also the matter of “sound” itself. - or sounds, human or natural. Some people who like working alone do not like to feel alone. They like being by themselves but not by themselves. They prefer having the sense and sound of an undemanding noise going on around them, an indication of a social world around them, and subtle signs that they are not locked into solitary confinement.

Before the pandemic, writing in coffee shops was a Thing to Do. Confined, some writers began writing to sound effects. They commented on the quiet clink and chatter of an illusory coffee shop, or the sounds of rain and water and the sea while among domestic comfort or wide woodland spaces without the unexpected peskiness of insects. A more comfortable "reality."

                                                     

While such sound effects didn’t work for me, there were and still are wonderful Writing Room zoom groups, where real writers greet each other on screen and then write for a set period of time with a fifteen minutes of chat afterwards. These, I have found in the past, are enjoyable and useful - and maybe a practice for after the festivities? Oddly enough, even though the sound button is muted, I am sure I can hear all the ideas gathering and ticking their way down into everybody’s work while we are together. And that is an encouraging and inspiring sound!

So now I'm wondering:

Are you someone who uses music around your writing? While you are writing? 

What do you listen to? What do you rush to turn off? 

Do you create personal playlists for your books or simply use a genre to inspire you?

Are you still stuck with a coffee shop app or do you welcome the sound of a real world library space? Or avoid any accompanying real world chatter?

All I know is that as I sit alone in my workroom early on the first of December, I hear the hum of the desktop, the as-yet disappointed click of the cat flap, and the creaking wheels of the much-welcomed oil radiator tucked tightly at my back. Silence is rarely silence.

Have a happy, peaceful and maybe musical December.

Penny Dolan

@pennydolan1

Hats, Music and New Books Sheena Wilkinson

Today I’m drawing names out of a hat. (If you’re reading this before noon (UK time!) you’ve got time to enter. You might win a free signed book. Just go to my FB or Twitter.  But it might be polite to stick around and read the post first.

Not the actual hat. The actual hat will be crocheted

I’m so happy to be doing this. Why? It’s not a big deal, surely? I have plenty of hats. No, it’s not a big deal in the sense that the prize is a copy of a book that retails at £7.99. But it’s a big deal for me because it’s my New Book. So allow me to be a bit celebratory on here today.

This time last year, when Street Song was on submission, I suffered the usual crippling doubts of the out-of-contract writer. Would an editor like it? Would an editor like it enough to persuade Sales and Marketing?

Happily, an editor did, and I’m very proud that Street Song (published a week today!) is one of the first titles in Edinburgh publisher Black and White’s new Ink Road YA imprint.

Street Song is a riches-to-rags story of secrets and songs; of stages and street-corners.  It’s a gritty exposé of exploitation, celebrity and destitution, but it’s also my love-song to music and friendship.

I’ve always loved music, especially singing. But I’d never written about it. I don’t think any of my previous characters so much as picked up a school recorder (though Esther in Still Falling shares my love for early Taylor Swift.)

My own teen years were dominated by an obsessive love for music. I’d save for weeks to afford the latest Echo and the Bunnymen or Big Country album, and then pray that one of the three or four record shops in Belfast would actually stock it.  When I left home to go university in 1987, I spent hours recording all those albums onto cassette (sorry: now as an author I appreciate why that was actually illegal) to take with me.

some of those LPs I'll never throw out

In my twenties and early thirties I helped run a folk club outside Belfast with a great group of friends. Our club became known as somewhere where people really listened. Even though we couldn’t pay as well as bigger venues, musicians loved playing for us. I also sang in lots of bars with my then-boyfriend (who’s still a musician, I’m happy to say.) It was all very grass roots and real. It was a million miles away from downloads and reality TV and auto-tuners and overnight fame and glitz.

Street Song is about someone who was the opposite of me, a reality talent show winner at seventeen who gets drunk on the glamour and the celebrity and then crashes. It’s about what happens when he wakes up from the hangover and starts to discover music and relationships for real. I hope I’ve managed to convey some of the thrill of making music with people. 

And now – I must go and put those names in the hat. Good luck!

The Outer Limits - Andrew Strong

Long ago, before most of you were born, I used to listen to music on vinyl.  A vinyl single was usually about three minutes long, and a vinyl album, or LP, twenty minutes a side.  When I started playing in bands, and writing my own songs, I thought it was best to write three minute songs, or to think in sets of songs forty minutes long.  The technology of playing music dictated what I wrote.

When I watch a film I wonder how the screenwriter’s plotting is influenced by a movie's eventual length.  If a film is ninety minutes long, each of its three acts gets to be thirty minutes.  People will feel short changed if a movie is less than an hour, and often complain if it goes on for too long.

But what dictates the length of a book?  I’m led to believe that publishers prefer children's novels to be shorter, but why?  Is it simply because huge books don't sell? Are they too daunting or too heavy?

The original draft of a book I’ve just finished was 120,000 words.  My agent insisted I cut in half. I did so, and although the book is neater, and sharper, I think it’s lost something of its rambling essence.  (Can an essence ramble?)

So, like a DJ who creates an extended mix, or like the Directors Cut of a movie available on DVD, I wonder whether it’s possible to publish both long and shorter versions of my new book.  And while I’m at it, I wonder if I could write an even shorter short one.  Take this to its logical conclusion and my book will end up as a short story, a poem, or even a tweet.  Perhaps it can exist, like matter, in a variety of states. The book is about music, so I suppose I could include a cd, or a link to a download.

These days so many of the contexts in which artists work are  in flux.  Writing is no longer confined to print, but to a myriad of forms.  We can write blogs of infinite length (that no one will read).  We can tweet pithy wisdom. (Nobody will read these either).  At sea in the online world, we have no limit to their imaginings.  I can write and record my music at home, upload it on to Soundcloud and don't have to concern myself with the memory capacity of the means of distribution.  The LP, the CD, even the concept of music of any finite length has been challenged by software such as Koan which enables music to be ‘generative’ – that is, the composer determines certain settings (key, pitch, tempo, arrangement) and the music unfolds infinitely.

As someone who trained as a painter, then spent ten years in music before writing books, I see many art forms suddenly released from their bonds, in freefall.  Of course it is liberating: there’s a new world out there, and it goes on forever. 

Writers have always enjoyed creating their own restraints: Joyce’s Ulysses, Georges Perec, the works of Italo Calvino, the Oulipo movement, they have all sought to devise structures to give their work some limit, a reaction to, perhaps, a sense of reality as too chaotic. 

Reality is too daunting to capture in its entirety, so we all need to be selective, to choose, to  limit.  But the boundaries of our reality are dissolving in the online world.  We get vertigo, we run to find the edges, there aren’t any.

And our security, like the security we get from good parents who give clear boundaries, is threatened.  It’s a brave new world.  It's daunting and exciting in equal measure.

So, if and when my new 'work' eventually comes out, maybe it will be in several forms, the least of which will be the printed book.  And if you miss most of them, please make sure you don't miss the tweet.

Is Competition Good for Us? by Joan Lennon

Children's writers are a bit like fish in those shrinking ponds in a drought.  We're not yet at the stage of trying to breathe mud, but still, times are tight.  So, is competition good for us?

First, watch the video ...

Now, discuss!


Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.

The Good, the Bad and the Quirky.

For the last five years I’ve been writing and rewriting a book in which twin sisters, taking alternate chapters, tell their life story.  They are child prodigies, musical geniuses, but rather than virtuosos, their instruments are the enigmatic black boxes and warm circuits of the recording studio.

 

There is a third voice, their bitter old brother.  He is the main protagonist, but he’s almost a ghost.

I created playlists of music to listen to as I constructed each character: one sister always seeking out new sounds, forever stretching the possible, the other twin crafting these experiments into something intricate and more beautiful. One is an experimenter, the other is obsessed with craft.

Creativity, it seems to me, is the constant smashing of the old and familiar, and then remaking something new with these fragments.  I wanted my book to be about creative children, and about creativity.  How we battle against our own instincts to make something worthwhile.

Authors are forever compromising, trying to do things differently, yet always holding back, aware that something too idiosyncratic will frighten publishers and audiences away. My new book may be a little eccentric, but I hope it's not that quirky. 

I’ve spent five years nurturing this trio of siblings, taking them from their father’s recording studio in Frankfurt, via their grandparents’ loft in the west of England to the improbable denouement in the deserts of Kazakhstan. Their musical odyssey is a search for authenticity, theirs and mine. It’s the book I’ve always wanted to write, I just hope I can find a publisher who believes in it too.

So You Want to Write - Joan Lennon

Having been born in Canada I feel quite proprietorial towards anything Glenn Gould - and here he is, giving excellent advice on writing a fugue which is also absolutely applicable to writing, well, anything!

So you want to write a fugue.
You got the urge to write a fugue.
You got the nerve to write a fugue.
So go ahead, so go ahead and write a fugue.
Go ahead and write a fugue that we can sing.

Pay no heed, Pay no mind.
Pay no heed to what we tell you,
Pay no mind to what we tell you.
Cast away all that you were told
And the theory that you read.
As we said come and write one,
Oh do come and write one,
Write a fugue that we can sing.

Now the only way to write one
Is to plunge right in and write one.
Just forget the rules and write one,
Just ignore the rules and try.

And the fun of it will get you.
And the joy of it will fetch you.
Its a pleasure that is bound to satisfy.
When you decide that John Sebastian must have been a very personable guy.

Never be clever
for the sake of being clever,
for the sake of showing off.

For a canon in inversion is a dangerous diversion,
And a bit of augmentation is a serious temptation,
While a stretto diminution is an obvious allusion.
And when you finish writing it
I think you will find a great joy in it.

 Hope so...
Nothing ventured, nothing gained they say
But still it is rather hard to start.

Well let us try right now.
Now we are going to write a fugue.
We're going to write a good one.
We're going to write a fugue ... right now.


The man has spoken!

Visit Joan's website
Visit Joan's blog.