Please tell me I'm not the only one who lives with music in my head. My life has a literal playlist that rolls through, it summons forth a song like it's thumbing through a Rolodex from my memory banks, inserts it and plays.
Did someone just REALLY pull out in front of me TWICE?
The Bitch Came Back by Theory of a Deadman
Depression kicking my ass?
Anything by Evanescence.
Happy?
Cue the Millennial Mixtape.
Time to remember my childhood and everyone that wrong me?
Anything with teenage Angst.
It's purely emotional.
When I write I have music on and a tarot deck near by.
I have three.
I also use it when writing my books.
The tarot cards are a whole other discussion. Hint: I use them when I need something random to happen in a story. They've become excellent storyteller tools.
Weekly, YouTube updates My Discovery file, and I get lost down the hole during the workweek. I sucked it up and bought the membership with how much I fucking use the music function.
YouTube: You're welcome. (PS, Thank you.)
At the same time, I try to avoid Florida driving hazards. Humans, school buses, and cars with humans in them drive 15 below the posted speed limit pre coffee. My weekly commutes to and from work are 15-20 minutes each; I have enough time to jam out and file away songs into my' book' playlists, personal and work ones. Then, if I'm alone at work, I replay the songs in the book file I'm working on blast, letting them tell me a story and then building on it in my head.
Movies, music, and tarot cards are where the storytelling starts for me; something always pops up; a memory, a feeling, an idea. It pearls up until it's a striking thing in my mind, and it's brought to life via music, then finely tuned by my imagination. It's an orgy of sounds, colors, TV show scripting, and nine yards of uncut fabric that deserve the perfect cut garment. If a particular song comes on, I imagine the start of a book I'm writing as if it were playing out before me as a show or a movie. I know what I like in my shows and films to start; I want to be knee-deep into something that I only have to slightly figure out. I like my mind to be in it, working through the problems the character is working through right then and there. I like feeling the same things they do.
I try to write like that.
So I start writing as if we are falling into a character's most private of moments; I start in their head. I know I'm always in my head; I also love learning what other people think because those moments are truthful.
I started We're All Okay, with a typical On-Call moment when I worked for Child Services. I start it out with the mundane but exciting to me, the start and end of a work night. I start and end it off without spoken words because half of the exciting things are inside.
And when you work by yourself at night, you don't talk much, and you're stuck thinking about what time you'll be off, what time you'll have to flex till the following day, and what you're walking into because it's always a mixed bag. What bag do I grab? Infant, Toddler, older? What chapter am I on in my book? Should I grab another one just in case I'm here longer?
As a kid, I spent more time with myself than with other kids, parents, or siblings. I was personally okay spending time with myself, especially since I couldn't get in trouble if I was just keeping myself company, right? Nope, even being a bookworm got me fussed at. All of my teen years, to be exact, got me fussed at because I didn't act like a typical teenager.
It still boggles me that I got yelled at for reading.
Anyways, I digress.
At the start of All Things Considered, I got into the main characters head because she’s who I was in high school. She’s a bookish woman, loves writing, crafts worlds in her head, but lacks a life outside of the pages of her books or her magazine column. We see it through, her world, and her view of the magazine. I have her explain things in her personality. Through her eyes, I grant her the ability to show us where we were going with the story.
Last, in Trauma Bound I use a fear of mine and make it real. I also use music I liked when I lived in Alabama. I let music mould a story loosely before I step in and add the flourishes.
It’s team work.
I try new stuff per story, so I'm not repeatedly using and rehashing the same story with different names. In essence it’s because I’m still learning to navigate the literary waters I’m treading blindly into. However, I do find my voice one literary leap at a time, so that’s nice.
Question: What’s on your inner playlist this week?
Mine:
New York by Cyn
Outsider by Rachel Grae
Hero by Grace Gaused
Mercy by Duffy (opening song to All Thing’s Considered)
You Know I’m No Good by Amy Winehouse
Sunday Morning by Maroon 5
Oh My God by Adele
A-O-K by Tai Verdes
Born For This by Foxxi
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