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 This is a continuation of my blogging here at WdC |
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This will be a blog for my writing, maybe with (too much) personal thrown in. I am hoping it will be a little more interactive, with me answering questions, helping out and whatnot. If it falls this year (2024), then I may stop the whole blogging thing, but that's all a "wait and see" scenario. An index of topics can be found here: "Writing Blog No.2 Index"  Feel free to comment and interact. |
| The Music Of Writing Back in the heady days of 2013 I was accepted into an anthology called Song Stories Vol 1, a collection of stories based loosely on songs. I have since had 4 more published, with another accepted for an anthology due for release soon. Anyway, as part of the publicity for that book twelve years ago, the editor organised a music-based blog hop. What they wanted is a discussion or something about how music has influenced an author’s writing. I looked at it, went, “Yeah,” and thought little more of it. But it would not leave me and, really, the more I thought about it, the more I realised music is especially important when I write. While that blog post is lost to the mists of time, here is a new version based on the notes: Apart from my series of stories called “Every Song Tells A Story” (as of 2025 more than 60 done, of which about 20 are any good and with quite a few published), music has been a subtle, background influence in my writing life. Side note – I used this when I was a teacher: the students had to find a song they liked, get its lyrics, and then use those lyrics as the basis of a story. Nice way to get the creative juices flowing. Anyway, I found that when I was in high school and started this thing we shall laughingly call my “writing career” that certain types of music influenced certain styles of writing and their overall feel. Poetry was best written to classical music, particularly pieces without lyrics. It can even be seen by reading some of the poems I wrote back when I was a teenager and in my twenties that some could guess what music was playing at the time. (Bach was obviously high on my playlist back then, for example.) Fantasy was influenced by heavy metal and hard rock, and even classic rock. My first decent completed novel ("20250331 Novel #3" ) was written under the influence of Led Zeppelin IV, AC/DC’s Back In Black and some Jimi Hendrix… at least musically. Even my fantasy short stories tend to have similar soundtracks. For example, in the 1990s The Who featured prominently with my so-called Secludos ethos stories.Science fiction was written with 1980s pop (especially New Romantics and their ilk) and/or David Bowie blasting through the headphones. I think it was the synthesised sound that did it for me, getting me into the mode/mood. Horror, though – by far the genre most of my stories have adopted – is generally supported by 1960s and 1950s music. The longest novel I have ever written, Year Of Change, for example, was written almost completely with the strains of Del Shannon pounding me relentlessly. Having said that, my horror stories written in the mid-2010s had a lot of Mike Oldfield in the background, which is pretty far removed from that normally associated with horror in my mind. And my humour does not have a musical backing. It has a visual one – classic black and white horror movies. Go figure. (Side note: When studying for high school exams, different music helped with different subjects – opera for English, 1950s & 1960s for Latin, classic rock & hard rock for maths 1 & 2, pop music for chemistry, and late 1960s music for physics. It helped… eventually.) Anyway, I thought this wasn’t the case anymore, but have found that as I completed my novel s for last year’s NaNoWriMo, I was listening to a lot of The Beatles, the re-released Red and Blue sets. So music and my writing are pretty entwined. It’s nice to think about it like that. |
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