My guest this week says he uses music before he sets hands to keyboard, to help conjure the creative mood. Sometimes it works the other way around; he’ll be writing and will realise the mind-jukebox is directing a scene to the structure or lyrics of a song. He trained as a lawyer but quickly found a creative outlet as a legal adviser on TV dramas. From there he began writing some of the UK’s most popular series and is now a crime novelist. Funnily enough, one of his key songs is Jon & Vangelis’s I’ll Find My Way Home, which one of my earliest guests used as a touchstone for his MG novel – isn’t it amazing how one piece of music can inspire such diverse ideas? He is TJ Cooke and he’s on the Red Blog with his Undercover Soundtrack.
‘Searching for truth’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, TJ Cooke
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#1 by Andreas Oskys on September 18, 2013 - 10:26 am
I find music to be the start and end point of my inspiration when I write. In fact, now I compose music to the scenes I write… I find it enhances tenfold the movement of the part or scene I find myself authoring. An example would be the theme score called “Battle of Titan” I composed for the chapter “Titan’s Grip” from vol 1 of “Worlds of Infinity – Guardians” a sci-fi novel I’m currently working on.
#2 by rozmorris @NailYourNovel @ByRozMorris on September 18, 2013 - 4:19 pm
Hi Andreas! You compose music for your writing too? That’s ultra creative and rather wonderful. Nice to meet you and I hope you enjoy my series; we do this every week.
#3 by Andreas Oskys on September 18, 2013 - 4:43 pm
Roz, Hi.. Yes! I follow the series and find it enlightening to say the least.
I think it’s great and I also believe it’s a great source of inspiration for authors alike, regardless of field or genre.
#4 by jpgrider on September 18, 2013 - 6:57 pm
I do the same thing with my writing. Either I hear a song that inspires a scene or I find a scene I am writing reminds me of a song. I cannot write without music. In two of my books, I wrote a song for the book as well, but I did not compose the music. I only wrote the lyrics. Each of my books touch upon some element of music, because I feel if it is important to me, it may be important to my characters. Doesn’t a song on the radio hit a nerve or two in your day to day routines? Well I feel that for my characters this would be true too.
Thank you for this post. It was interesting.
#5 by rozmorris @NailYourNovel @ByRozMorris on September 19, 2013 - 8:16 am
Gosh, JP, another multicreative person. And you’re dead right about randomly heard songs suddenly snatching the mood and making sense of it. When I’m deep in a novel, the story and characters become like my own life and I make some wonderful connections by listening to random tracks on the radio.
Glad you enjoyed the post and thanks for leaving a line here.