Music tells us stories - Roz Morris

So we sit down, wake the laptop, place coffee beside keyboard, flex knuckles, stare meaningfully at the ceiling, put on headphones... and begin. 

What's going into our ears? Something pure like birdsong? Something contemplative and thoughtful for the earnest business of noveling?

Not necessarily. It might just as easily be grinding guitars and ripping vocals.

My blog series The Undercover Soundtrack has been going for a year now, and more than 50 writers have so far shared the music that helped them invent and hone their novels.

Soundtracks
Undercover Soundtracks are not the songs their characters like, or the music played at their weddings. They are writers' secret ingredients, meditative antechambers where they can study their characters’ true natures, conjure an atmosphere or examine the nature of an elusive moment.

Catherine Czerkawska

Among the first contributors were members of this group. Dan Holloway searched for nostalgia and directionlessness. Catherine Czerkawska puzzled over whether the book came first or the music. AE founder Katherine Roberts dreamed up her novel to folk and Celtic music and former member Nicola Morgan drenched herself in Coldplay until her family yelled ‘Noooooooo’.  

Dan Holloway: nostalgia

Another early AE, Linda Gillard, scored a hit with readers when she explained how a Philip Glass piece rescued her novel's structure. And if you're a fan of John A A Logan, watch out because he's coming soon with the sounds that serve his dark imagination. In fact, just watch out.
Some soundtracks are historically literal. Katherine Langrish chose the troubadour songs of the 12th century for her tale of lost love. Ellie Stevenson found possibly the last song ever played on RSS Titanic for her novel Ship of Haunts. Erika Robuck evoked 1930s Cuba with Cole Porter. 

Indeed Cole Porter trots through quite a few Soundtracks regardless of period, as does the film composer Hans Zimmer. Other writers’ favourites are Seal and JS Bach . (There's probably a joke in there.)

One or many?
Sometimes a writer's soundtrack is a few sacred pieces, even stretched across multiple novels. Sometimes one novel alone gets a soundtrack longer than a Broadway musical.
Undercover Soundtracks also mark how we draw on our real lives. Jessica Thompson used a track with desperately romantic associations to recreate a scene between lovers  Catherine Ryan Howard made a musical time capsule to revisit long-ago adventures for her second travel memoir.

Some writers find lyrics are unbearably intrusive. Others happily ignore them and give themselves to the emotion, as though the words weren’t there at all. Once a song enters a book's landscape, it means whatever the writer wants. While I was writing My Memories of a Future Life, a perfectly famous song ambushed me from the radio and it was as if I heard it for the first time.

Ritual
For some writers, music is a ritual. Jennie Coughlin repeats The Boxer for hours, a rhythmic slave driver, drumming her to the finish. Catherynne M Valente has a special piece that begins every creative day.

Ask a non-writer to set up an author’s desk and the last thing they would probably furnish it with was music. But so many of us are completely fuelled by sound, writing in a state of semi-possession. Maybe, as one commenter said, it's because music can punch so much experience at us without a single word, goading us to bend our own artform a little better. Many contributors cheerfully - or ruefully - admit they can't read a note yet they find that music makes fundamental sense.

Whatever theory you favour, these pieces seem to turn a novel inside out. We come away - or I do - having glimpsed the soul of a book - and of a writer too.

Does music tell you stories?

Roz Morris is a bestselling ghostwriter and book doctor. She blogs at Nail Your Novel  and has a double life on Twitter; for writing advice follow her as @dirtywhitecandy, for more normal chit-chat try her on @ByRozMorris. Her books are Nail Your Novel: Why Writers Abandon Books And How You Can Draft, Fix and Finish With Confidence, available in print and on Kindle  She also has a novel, My Memories of a Future Life available on Kindle (US and UK) and also in print. You can also listen to or download a free audio of the first 4 chapters right here.