Day 172-174: Using music to construct scenes.

We have continued to go back to Stories, I have continued to write like a madwoman these past couple of days. It's been rough, but the book will be better for it.

Something that I've noticed in my own writing process is that I need music. If I can construct the feeling of a scene through music, it usually sticks. If I just sort of go into the scene with a "I don't know let's see what happens waaa!", it usually does not stick. Each of the scenes I wrote to some sort of background music turned out great and I haven't had to do a lot to them. All of the scenes where I was listening to some Pandora station or nothing at all, I've had to rewrite a million times.

I've already written on this blog about my struggle to allow myself to use music again. I thought maybe I was using the music as a crutch, but it's just how my brain operates. My musical decisions don't always make sense. For example, Spiderman II 's "My Enemy" by Hans Zimmer and about fourteen other people helped me pace out the brain of my MC. He sometimes thinks really fast, and so I had to hear for myself what that sounds like:

And when it came to tracking relationships, having songs that sound like your characters and sometimes keep their motivations in check can come in handy:

I also had absolutely no idea how to start this book. And while this has nothing to do with the opening of my book, while this is not even the same story, listening to how Lin-Manuel Miranda started his musical with use of focus and pacing helped me immensely in trying to come up with a strong first page:

And then sometimes you write the climax to a song and it only makes sense to you why you picked it, and that song is a song you really didn't want to like because you disagree with their music video choices:

I also have been studying how the songs are structured in order to make one full album or, in the best example of Lin-Manuel Miranda, how a full musical is formed. Miranda takes each scene as its own song with its own genre of music. Some scenes are way more musical theatre, others scenes use the history of hip hop and beat-boxing to show the growth of a character from boy to man. Last night while I was listening to the song where a Loyalist gives a rebuttal to Alexander, I realized Miranda had written it as a baroque piece, starting with the main melody and then using variations later on.

By looking at our scenes this way, we can flow like music. We can bring some sort of focus to detail to a chapter when it is so easy to rush through that second act or see the book as a full piece and not as separate parts in a working machine. There won't be any filler, there won't be any useless lines.

Now the problem is: what song do I use today?