Music and Writing

I don't think there has been a single line of a single story that I have ever written that did not have a theme song in the background. It's very interesting how much music makes my stories for me. I generally begin a story, get a few (fifteen or so) pages in and then go compile a soundtrack. Sometimes a song inspires the story and for a long time I just listen to the single song on repeat.

Because I've gotten back into editing I've been considering this music business again. When I had wrote the original version of LoE:FC (yes it's an acronym now) I didn't have a song for it. I simply holed up in my little mostly unfurnished room and wrote furiously (by hand). When I began to rewrite it (by hand) we had moved and I worked in retail so I had a fluctuating schedule. The theme song at that time was May It Be, by Enya from The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring. It didn't make sense to me at the time because back then the story had this horribly tragic ending that was a resemblance of the relationship I was "in" at the time. I couldn't see the forest for the trees so to speak.

When I finally sat down in 2008 to do my first NaNoWriMo I thought of LoE:FC but it didn't happen, I wasn't ready to see the forest yet. Oddly enough LoE:FC doesn't have it's own playlist yet, it piggybacks off another playlist I made in about 2006. May it Be is still a very important song for this story, and likely will still be the theme in my head. But now I see the forest and I understand why the song is so important to the heart of my story.

So this year, since I'm still deciding what to write, I'm trying to look to the music I'm attached to and see if the story lies hidden in the music. So far it seems the music is leaning towards two story ideas. One I call Hitori (Phoenix in Japanese) and the other I'll call Cassandra. Both have been attempted but neither have gotten passed maybe the third page in writing. So I'll be interested to see if either of these stories ends up being the one to get written. There is another that almost always lurks in the shadows waiting, Star Rose, but it's got something like fifteen to thirty pages typed already so I would have to write 50k more than that for the challenge. So I'd be writing closer to 75-90k. We'll see.

Writing without music is like breathing without air, at least to me.