Music is my muse for writing
Music really is an essential part of the soundtrack of our lives. We live to it, work to it, play to it, love to it. Grieve, ache and mourn to it. And write to it. I know I do. Do you?
I know I’m not the only one like this: I look at my life and hear songs on replay. Just like scents, particular songs carry me back to moments and seasons. It’s a bit like a movie soundtrack, tugging away at my emotions, evoking experiences all over again.
There are so many songs that propel me through my writing on a daily basis, just like Stephenie Meyer and Muse. In fact many songs on the Twilight soundtracks have become muse for my own Immersed series.
When it comes to visualising the paranormal characters in my story, one song in particular helped me capture exactly what and who my main character Hunter, cursed Nemaro is. He wants to be better than his curse makes him, to protect Skye from the darkness inside him, and although he doesn’t know it, perhaps his love for her could set him free. All of this came to life for me with this beautiful song Demons by Imagine Dragons. Every time I listen to this, like right now, tears come to my eyes as I feel Hunter’s pain, the darkness he wants to hide, and his protective, transcending love for Skye.
There is another song that has been such a presence in visualising my story that every time I hear it my insides go a bit trembly, and I relive a scene that hasn’t even happened…yet. It is one of those pivotal scenes that my whole story hangs on in my heart, originally anticipated as the climax when it was a stand-alone being outlined. Now it is planned for the last and possibly final book, book three which I’m outlining right now.
With the whole ‘murder your darlings’ truism where sometimes the scenes or phrases a writer loves the most have to leave the stage, this scene might not even make the cut. But every time Metric’s Emily Haines’ ethereal voice and composition Eclipse [All Yours] comes onto my writing soundtrack I melt just a little, and I see Skye run in desperation over wave-lashed rocks to where her love Hunter is dissolving, becoming mist, foam on the sea. Can she reach him in time? Can she save him if she does?
I hope you will click on the links to YouTube for both of those songs, and can visualise some of the things I’ve described when you do. Or that once day you might read these things in my stories and connect them with the songs and enjoy them as much as I do.
If there are songs that move you in your writing, or reading, that transport you to a different time, place, or world, I’d love to hear about it.
Thanks for reading.
PS. You can check out Find Me on your favourite platform here
