Writing and music

The more I think about it the more I’ve realized my novels seem to spring from music. The novel I’m working on now was inspired by a piece by Thomas Bergersen. The novel before that was inspired by an album by Sting in which he performs a series of Renaissance era songs by  John Dowland, interspersed with readings from Dowland’s letters. My third novel was inspired by The Longships, by Enya, and my very first novel was at least partly the result of listening to Jean-Michel Jarre’s album “Waiting for Cousteau”, and most specifically by the first two tracks, Calypso I and II. The only exception thus far is my second novel, a Warhammer Fantasy fan fic, which was begun as a serialized story for a players forum and just happened to hit the low end of novel length before I was done. And that one included lyrics I wrote for an in-story war hymn based on the Russian Federation Anthem (just replace the mens choir with a bunch of knights and you get the idea).

It seems that no amount of ideation or planning can move me to write a novel until I encounter a song that adequately captures the tone and emotion of the story for me. Every story has to have an emotional core to it for it to mean enough to me to want to tell it. Even if that emotional core is for a single scene, largely unrelated to the rest of the novel, that’s enough. For example, my novel “Tears of the Worldsmiths” originally began with our protagonist on the shore of a vast lake enshrouded in fog. Through that fog he begins to hear the steady pulse of a drum, and over top of that an almost ethereal, lilting female voice singing. Out of the fog appears a longship, and at the bow there stands a woman clad in flowing white, invoking her magic through the song she sings.

That’s the image I initially got in my head from listening to the Enya song, and from that I ended up extrapolating that the observer on the shore was a blacksmith who had become caught up in the curse on the small town he came to live in. The singing woman was a junior member of the ruling council of wizards, invited by the townsfolk to come and break the curse, being escorted across the lake by the boatmen sent to ferry her. And soon after that I knew that the curse had been brought on themselves by the townsfolk by either engaging in or allowing the slaughter of an innocent band of gypsies, and who hoped to fool the sorceress into lifting the curse without digging too deeply into its origins.

This all was taken up and resolved in a short story, but I always knew there was more there. When I came back to writing after nearly a twenty year break (with the exception of the Warhammer fan fic) I set about expanding on that original story, still inspired by the initial imagery inspired by the song. That one image was no more than a page or two in the last draft, but it drove an entire novel.

So I guess in my case, at least, if a picture is worth a thousand words, a song is worth a hundred pictures.