The Other Creativity

I freely admit writing is not my most instinctive creative outlet. I'm most formally trained in and naturally inclined to music. I started plunking notes on a piano before I began play school. My parents eventually realised they'd have to send me to lessons or I'd keep up my passionate, nonsensical compositions into adulthood. Lessons and I had a mixed, convoluted relationship, but the end result is that I play piano quite well, and music is an integral part of who I am.

I find my writing ideas sometimes manifest in music first. Before they take textual form, they float in my head as abstract, meta-ideas waiting for birth. Sometimes it's just a feeling. An emotion, a fleeting image of a character. An action. A literary climax.

I express these ideas far more easily in music than I do in words. Words I learned through study and practice. So much practice. Music came before I knew how to print with a pencil. When I get stuck on an idea, I sit at my piano or composition keyboard. I hold the embryonic images in my head, and I let my fingers speak. I craft music for dialogue and for soundless scenes. For grief, for joy. Whatever I am trying to express.

As I begin to actually write, and the story morphs and grows, so does the music. I go back and re-compose entire tracks. It helps me track theme and voice in a fluid medium.

I also spend time finding music playlists to listen to. Assigning songs, whether contemporary or older, to characters and scenes forces me to define those characters and scenes first. If I don't know who my protagonist is, I find it hard to nail them down musically. If I have trouble completing writing on a chapter, I'll stop working, put on music, and see if it works with the words.

It's a complicated thing to explain. But expressing myself creatively through music helps eliminate some of the frustrating discord that strangles my mind when it tries to put too much at once on to paper. In the end, the music and the writing have an intertwined, inseparable relationship in my creative soul.

Music and Horizon's Children

I didn't compose any music for my manuscript, Horizon's Children, until after I had a detailed rough-outline of the story in hand. It was a very different tale then. The characters were younger, the story was a great deal darker, and the two protagonists were less likable. I didn't realise the latter until I set the idea aside for several years, grew up myself, and returned to find they weren't complex and complicated -- they were just frustrating.

Which is not to say that teenagers aren't complex, complicated, and frustrating all at the same time. But it wasn't the story I wanted to tell. Not now. I figured, it was time to grow Kas and John up a bit, both in age and mindset.

When I returned to the story, I also found some music I had done along with the outline. And if I wasn't sure then that I had to revise my characters, I realised it when I listened to the tracks. They were dark and melancholy and made me think I was about to read a young adult's gothic fiction. Again, nothing wrong with that, but not the mature yet optimistic story I wanted to explore.

The searing, operatic metal chords morphed into a single french horn and a discordant distortion guitar. The string quartet gave way to a melodic yet haunting clarinet. Which itself evolved, as I worked through chapters and musical tracks, to a simplistic and beautiful folk guitar.

As the story condensed and refocused, it became a story about humanity. About humans. Two people and their story. It wasn't a heroic, Greek odyssey. It was an everyman's tale, and it needed the folk guitar.

John, the main male protagonist, plays guitar. He eventually relents and drags it out for Kas in one of the later chapters. A friend asked me at one point what song I figured he played, and in my head, it was this dark metal song done up in an acoustic arrangement. This mental image persisted for quite a while, in part due to how I envisioned John's voice sounding. "He sounds like Corey Taylor from Stone Sour," I had said. "Not Slipknot Corey Taylor. Stone Sour Taylor. When Taylor sings Through Glass and it's beautiful and melancholic."

True, that, about John's voice. But the musical feel just wasn't right. And then, as I worked on the music myself, it hit me. It's a folk guitar. Why not make it a folk song? Something from the region explored in the story. Something poignant and personal and discordant in its twisted lyrics.

Thus, Shenandoah was appropriated, re-written, and worked into the text itself. And that change gave me the last kick I needed to bring the manuscript into its present incarnation.