Story Songs

Sometimes I find pieces of my stories in songs.

I think it's an interesting relationship; music and storytelling. Music is a great source of inspiration - it speaks a language words are insufficient to match. It paints pictures, sets scene and tone, conveys emotion. Music is its own form of storytelling. So when an author is writing a book or short story, the music they listen to must have some effect on their work, right? It does for me.

I have a playlist on my iPod called "Story List." It's where I keep the songs that have a direct correlation to a writing project of mine, past or present. In each of these cases, it wasn't a matter of sitting down and saying, "Here's a song I like. I'm going to write a story to go with it." Instead, each time I may have had a germ of an idea, an idea in a different manifestation perhaps, or maybe just the notion that I needed to write something, and soon. Then I heard the song, and it was like a spark suddenly blossoming to full-fledged fire. Something in the song drew the story out of me.

Sometimes it's nearly the whole song that fits. Sometimes it's barely a line of it. But something in the song, the arrangement of notes, the tempo, and most especially the words, makes the connection.

I'm going to give a few examples to show what I mean, mostly of past projects (because I don't want to give away things I'm still working on!)

EXAMPLE #1

THE STORY: A short story I wrote back in high school about a man kept in solitary confinement by a mysterious enemy army. His mind creeps into the realm of insanity, but he is able to hold on long enough to reality that when the war is over and he's freed he's able to piece his identity back together.

THE SONGS: "Glycerine" by Bush. "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane. "White Room" by Cream. "

SAMPLE LYRICS:

"I'm never alone / I'm alone all the time."

"When logic and proportion have fallen softly dead / and the White Knight is talking backwards / and the Red Queen's off her head / remember what the Doormouse said / feed your head"

"I'll wait in this place where the sun never shines / wait in this place where the shadows run from themselves"

EXAMPLE #2

THE STORY: A reluctant young mother is having trouble dealing with the fact that she feels no nurturing, motherly instinct at all for her child. In fact, she's afraid of it - to the point that she still calls her "it," and has nightmares where her daughter turns into some weird monstrous thing that attacks her. Over the course of the short story she finally comes to form a bond with her daughter, in an unlikely way.

THE SONG: "Plenty of Paper" by Eisley

SAMPLE LYRICS:

"Something's growing under that wing / I think a face is dawning" (Inspired me to write the opening nightmare in which the baby starts growing a second face in its armpit)

EXAMPLE #3:

THE STORY: It's pretty long and complicated, somewhere between a short story and a novella, but the scene that started it all was the idea of what it would be like for a ghost to be restored once more to a physical body, to be resurrected into physical being and life.

THE SONG: "Hide and Seek" by Imogen Heap

Sample lyrics:

"Where are we? / What the hell is going on? / The dust has only just begun to form / crop circles in the carpet. / Sinking, feeling. / Spin me round again and rub my eyes / this isn't happening."
(It wasn't just the lyrics, but the ethereal, urgent, mournful, and almost accusatory tone of the song as well.)

EXAMPLE #4:

THE STORY: A future world where trees are nearly extinct. People have to visit them in a tree sanctuary, which looks much like a zoo only for plants instead of animals. The story follows a terminally ill young boy who comes to see the trees, and one of the botanists who works there who has just discovered a secret that will change her life forever.

THE SONG: "Big Yellow Taxi" by Joni Mitchell

SAMPLE LYRICS:

"They took all the trees and they put 'em in a tree museum / and they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them."


So, maybe these examples don't get the picture across, but when I hear these songs now, I don't just hear these songs. It's like the world of the story comes alive inside me as they play, from the first chord to the very last note.

Somebody else's story inspires me to tell my own. I love that.

Found

When it comes to the stories that break your heart, rock your world, open your eyes—these stories, the best stories, are never told. Never made up. They are found.

There are made up stories. There are stories we write and tell. But every once in a while you’ll come across a story and you’ll read it, or watch it in the movie theater or on TV, and you’ll know. It will be too familiar, too right, and once you experience it you won’t be able to imagine that the world ever existed without this story in it. These characters, the things that happen to them, the moments you will never be able to forget—they all fit too well, they all ring too true. It’s like they’ve always been, and you just happened to be the lucky one who found them.

Writing is an art and it’s something you work hard at. You slave some days. It’s not all waterfalls of words rushing onto a page. And by saying this, that a story is found not created, some might think I am disrespecting this process. But I'm not. It’s hard. It takes guts and discipline and a sharp mind and a special talent and a magical something-else that I don’t quite have the word to express. It takes curiosity, passion, a special kind of madness, the ability to push yourself, to stay on task, to reach the goal. You write. You rewrite. You revise. You remove. You add. You change a word. You change it back. This can go on ten, twenty, a hundred times. I do not mean to belittle this in the least.

But even after all of that, at the end of the day when you have the finished product sitting there—it doesn’t ever really seem finished, does it? And that goes back to what I’m saying—nay, insisting. Because you stumbled upon it, somewhere inside you. Call it your psyche. Your link into the collective unconscious. Whatever it is, you’ve found something, and it’s there, and all of this work—it’s like you’re an archaeologist brushing away dirt. There’s a skeleton down there somewhere, and you’re bringing it out of whatever it was that has hidden it away and back into the light of day for all to see. Sometimes you don’t get the whole thing dislodged. Maybe it’s just enough to recognize the shape of what’s beneath. So even when the book is published and sitting on a shelf, or when the show is on air, or when the movie’s shot and released, it might not be the whole picture. But you’ve found enough of whatever it was that we recognize it and identify with it, and we let part of ourselves fill in the gaps, brush away the rest. We get to find it along with you.

Does this make any sense? Not necessarily. I’m rambling, and I’ve just finished watching the LOST finale and it would take a whole other blog post to react to that ending.

But do you know what I mean? You have to know the feeling. Because you’ve found something too, I just know it. A story, a world, people. They may not be real the way you and I are real, but somehow they’re even more real than we are if that makes any sense. You know them. Somehow you’ve always known.

Somehow I’ve always known.