It's All About The Writing - And The Music

I write to music. I always have. My novel has a soundtrack. Since the first day I sat down and stared at the blank page, remembering all of the writing advice I'd heard and read, "Start with action," "Start at a life changing moment," "Skip the throat clearing," Alice has been with me. Alice in Chains, that is. Yes, for those who know me, they know, I'm a diehard Alice fan.

Seventy percent of the novel was composed while listening to "Black Gives Way to Blue" and "Facelift" exclusively. I couldn't write to anything else. I have "Dirt," "Jar of Flies," "Sap," "Alice in Chains," "Unplugged," "Live," but the moment my iTunes switched to one of them, I was immediately distracted. I'm an equal opportunity Alice player, so to find myself favoring one CD over another for this particular task was intriguing.

But, who am I to question process? IT WORKED!

Then, I saw "Super 8." One of my favorite songs growing up was ELO's "Don't Bring Me Down," which, if you've seen "Super 8," you know it was featured in the movie. Yes, that was me dancing in my seat. Perhaps it was that, perhaps it was where I was in my novel, perhaps it was that every time I clicked on "We Die Young," the first song on "Facelift," iTunes would send a message that said, "SERIOUSLY! AGAIN?" No, "Again" is on the eponymous CD...

I guess you have to be an Alice fan to get the joke.

Sensing I was close to thinking I was done with the novel, I decided to make up my own playlist of influential and inspirational songs to get me through the Warsaw Uprising. Songs like, "Bad Boys Running Wild" by The Scorpions, "Wherever I May Roam" by Metallica, "Burn It To The Ground" by Nickelback, and more Alice. A lot of the songs meant something to me, some were just a play on words, like "Dynamite" by The Scorpions. I listened to that while I wrote about blowing up a train depot, along with "Rock You Like a Hurricane," "Blackout," and "Energy" by Shinedown.

Hey, I have FUN while I write, and then I break my own heart and cry. Anyway...

Of course, there was this eclectic mix of music that had nothing to do with anything. It was just a groove I liked. The playlist was almost four hours long, and I tried to write all the way through the playlist. Sometimes I replayed a song or set of songs if I felt the need.

One of my first readers commented that my novel is "dark." Maybe that's why Alice's music resonated as the "soundtrack." Today, as I drove home from work, I played "Your Decision," "Black Gives Way to Blue," and "Down in a Hole." Listening to the lyrics, I could picture different scenes from my novel, all of them painful.

When people ask if the novel is autobiographical, first novels are supposedly autobiographical, I say, "It's a WWII drama about the Polish Resistance," and they think it isn't autobiographical. They think because of the time period, the setting, that it doesn't have any of me in it. It is all me. I wrote it from a place of pain. I dipped from the same well that Alice pulled their songs from, The Universal Shithole of Darkness. It is the obscene and unwilling experiences of darkness that caused my characters to say, "You understand. You will write our story, but it will also be your story. Your story is what lies beneath."

That isn't to say that every single scene in the novel represents a literal real life experience. It's not the literal... and that's the cool thing about being a writer. When you surrender to it, when you stop telling your characters what to do, and start listening to them, you find yourself in places you have not yet begun to imagine. (Tip: Your characters tell you what to do in the first draft. You tell them what to do in the second, and third, etc. "No, no! Get over here! There's a giant hole you need to fill!") I love this process. I love revising and editing more than I ever thought I would. I love seeing things in my writing I wasn't even aware of as I wrote it.

I LOVE WRITING! And, I love making my own soundtracks. The one today reminds me of the fan fiction I used to write... I'm Hungry Like the Wolf! Haha!