Old post from 2015, but still relevant!

Music has always played a huge part in my creative process. I can hear a song like, I Never Told You what I Do For A Living, by My Chemical Romance .  .  .

.  .  .  and come up with a really awful bad guy type character and then build on that by asking myself questions:

“What if he’s really not so bad?” Or more aptly, “How does someone who commits a despicable act live with it? What lies do they have to tell themselves to keep going?”

(Honest to goodness, that song is the soundtrack of one particularly terrible person you readers will get to meet in–working title: INERTIA–my first endeavor into SCI-FI)

Music has played such a huge part of my creative process that I have ended up writing a book about a girl obsessed with the lead singer of a rock band. [INSERT SHAMELESS PLUG] It’s out on the 15th, BTW

I hardly ever listen to music without brainstorming, which is kind of funny because lately I cannot listen to any song without relating the lyrics or sound to something in my latest book, September Rain.

Every writer has those scenes that they find tough to write. The awesome song/video above helped me get through one of my most difficult scenes in this most recent book, which ended up being pivotal after about twenty re-writes.

A scene with lots of dialogue.

The moments I usually have the most trouble with are the ones where the characters are having a defining moment and those parts don’t often include verbosity.

Trauma hardly ever needs words.

But there are also some things–like a particular breakup that’s been building between two characters–that cannot happen without lots of mean-spirited  exchanges.

And this song, Say Something, really helped me connect with the deep emotion that the scene required.

As a writer, if I’m not crying, if my words aren’t  drawing out an emotion–anger, frustration, pity, sympathy, hope, joy, peace, laughter– in the reader, than it’s not good enough.

It’s not finished.

But I digress.

I guess, all I’m saying is that I use music to help me draw on the emotion I need, to get into the head-space of my characters who are going through things that I pray I never have to.

That’s all for now!