‘I woke from a wondrous and startling dream’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Mark Staufer

I’ve often thought we need to be able to film our dreams. While we’re at it, can we please record the fully orchestrated music we compose in them? While I’ve slumbered, I’ve written albums that surpassed my favourite artistes, and when my eyes open they’re gone. My guest this week clearly thinks the same way. He woke from a dream and wished he could preserve it on film… not surprising as he is a screenwriter and former head of production at Universal Studios. From this idea began a supernatural thriller – but it’s no ordinary book.  He worked with a composer and sound designer to create a multimedia app that’s a book when you want to read and a musical experience when you choose to open your ears. And of course there are the secret pieces that showed him the souls and truths of his characters. He is Mark Staufer, and he’s on the Red Blog with his Undercover Soundtrack.

‘This is my blues novel’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Nathan Singer

My guest this week is another of those enviably talented writers who is as happy playing a set of strings as a qwerty keyboard. Not only that, he is a playwright and an experimental performing artiste. He says his various novels correspond to musical genres and he often composes a soundtrack before he starts writing. Beyond his own compositions, many of his favourite musicians help to set the tone and create the atmosphere, and some of them end up as cameos in the story. And what a story – the book he describes as his ‘blues novel’ features hellhounds in suits, a 1938s afterlife (possibly)  and resurrected loves. He is Nathan Singer, and he’s on the Red Blog with the Undercover Soundtrack to Chasing The Wolf.

‘Music dark and soulful; rural and tough’ – Dave Malone, The Undercover Soundtrack

My guest this week is best known for his poetry collections, but has had a weakness for crime fiction ever since he was a 10-year-old, smuggling a radio to bed to catch Mystery Theater. Music – and a few fingers of bourbon – were his close companions when writing his first novelet Not Forgiven, Not Forgotten. The Hank Dogs made the main character a dark angel in a corrupt town. Billie Holiday stopped the romance getting too sweet. He is Dave Malone and he’s on the Red Blog with his Undercover Soundtrack.

‘Friendship, betrayal and making sense of the past’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Catherine Czerkawska

You may recognise the name of my guest this week. She was one of my earliest Soundtrackers and she returns this week with a novel of friendship and betrayal: a man looking back on his youth and making sense of a troubled history. It’s set in Glasgow, and traditional Scottish music gave her both geographical setting and emotional landscape: the depth in apparent simplicity, the universal condition of loving and losing. She is novelist and award-winning playwright Catherine Czerkawska; the novel is The Physic Garden and she’s on the Red Blog with its Undercover Soundtrack.

Stuck or blocked? How to keep writing anyway

You’ve got a gap in your story. Or you’re revising and it’s clear a drafted scene won’t do.

Usually, the best remedy is to give up and do something else.

But Charlotte Rains Dixon reminded me in a comment here a few weeks ago that sometimes it’s good to push through. Even if you’ve run the tank dry. And sometimes deadlines mean you don’t have the luxury of a break.

Here are some ways I get my muse to pick up.

Seek inspiration

Behind your pesky page there’s a seductive internet. And you’re sitting there, annoyed with the way your creative day is going.

Do not open your browser. Surfing turns so easily into skiving.

If I’m trying to break a block I go to my reference bookshelf. Not the dictionaries, although The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought can provide a surprise or two. But beside these sensible titles I have a collection of oddities that friends have given me (probably because it’s easier than guessing what fiction to give a fussy novelist). Thus I am the lucky owner of Never Hit A Jellyfish With a Spade – How to Survive Life’s Smaller Challenges. The Z to Z of Great Britain. And Mirror Mirror on the Wall – Women Writers Explore Their Favourite Fairy Tales.  Any of these, consulted at random, can provide a wild card to astonish the imagination.

Poetry collections are handy too, to remind me to look beyond the surface for deeper significance. Especially if I’m asking myself if I’ve missed the real reason why a scene or event has to be in the book.

Diagnose the problem

It also helps to define a few parameters.

• Work out what can’t happen – both for this individual story and for the readers of your genre as a whole. Then you know where you should be heading.
• Ask yourself what matters in the scene. Why it’s important to the story and to the characters. (If it’s not, job done.)
• Quite often if you’re stuck, your brain is telling you you’re trying to write the wrong thing. Are you forcing the characters to say and do things they would find unnatural? Should you listen to what they would rather do?
• Are you stuck because the scene repeats an idea you’ve used elsewhere in the book? Now you know to make it different.
• Are there hidden significances or issues you’re glossing over? That ‘stuck’ feeling might be your helpful writerly subconscious telling you you’re wasting an opportunity.

Still stuck? Push on anyway

Now this is what Charlotte was talking about. Write anyway. Yes it works. Sometimes you’ll be surprised by what comes out. It’s like having an interrogator refusing to let go.

‘What happens now?’

‘Bah, I don’t know.’

‘That’s not good enough, I don’t believe you don’t know. Tell me again – what happens now?’

When I do this, my first attempts are risible, and I keep deleting. But after a while I find the scent. I’ve often resorted to this in revisions, and written some of my best scenes because I stayed stubbornly in the saddle.

Desperate measures

You could follow the lead of science fiction author A E Van Vogt. When he was stuck, he would move to the spare room for the night and set the alarm to wake him after an hour and a half. When it went off, he would force himself to try to solve the problem, inevitably falling back asleep. He repeated this all night and in the morning, voila.

Which just goes to show what it can be like living with a writer sometimes. You can find other less unsociable tips in Nail Your Novel.

Thanks for the cat pic turkeychik

Tell me what you do when you get stuck and time off isn’t an option. Share in the comments!

‘Emotive music explains the terror of the people’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Liz Fisher-Frank

My guest this week turned to writing novels after long years as a children’s rights lawyer representing teenagers in care. Her fiction debut, Losing Agir, was launched on Human Rights Day and is a teen thriller about a child in care and a refugee who unite to seek justice. Music helped her connect with the realities of her displaced characters’ lives, especially experiences that most of us take for granted – such as a family Christmas. She is Liz Fisher-Frank and she’s on the Red Blog talking about Losing Agir and its Undercover Soundtrack.

‘My stories replay the soundtrack of my life’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Brendan Gisby

My guest this week had never realised his fiction was so closely tied to music, nor how much that meant it reflected the landmarks of his own life. Through significant songs he has peeled back the years to channel aspects of his family and upbringing, to flesh out the characters in his short stories and novels. He is McStorytellers founder Brendan Gisby and he’s on the Red Blog sharing his Undercover Soundtrack

‘I love to play with grey areas in my fiction’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Niki Valentine

My guest this week set her psychological thriller in a music conservatoire. Two pieces of music brought the book to life for her – a Schubert song with a beguilingly vulnerable female vocal, and a Rachmaninov sonata that turned out to have an illuminating link with Goethe’s Faust. She is Niki Valentine and she’s on the Red Blog today talking about the Undercover Soundtrack to her novel Possessed.

A whole novel into a song? The Undercover Soundtrack inside out – Beth Rudetsky

How do you distil an entire novel into a song or a series of songs?

This is a task of mad proportions – and a question that will resonate with any writer who is stuck in the throes of a pitch or blethering through a blurb. Or is simply trying to fathom what their own darn book is about.

This weekend I’m celebrating the anniversary of the launch of My Memories of a Future Life. And since the story explores reincarnation in reverse, I thought I’d turn the Undercover Soundtrack inside out. I’m inviting two musicians whose work has featured on book trailers  in past posts to share how they pack an entire novel into a teensy song.

So today, please welcome composer-singer Beth Rudetsky on the Red Blog who’ll be talking about writing a song for Zoe Sharp’s thriller Fifth Victim

‘She’s just a kid, flying high, full of imagination and life’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Terri Giuliano Long

My guest this week was stopped in her tracks one evening by a Springsteen song, which became a young girl pushing boundaries, which became a finely drawn portrait of a family in turmoil. Other songs came to define pivotal moments – and the novel itself went on to win awards. That novel is In Leah’s Wake, the author is Terri Giuliano Long - and she’s at the Red Blog today, talking about its Undercover Soundtrack