This striking phrase is a manifesto for a character who lives, breathes and seeks refuge in music. She is Daisy, an aspiring musician coping with a family member who is slipping into dementia. In the early stages of writing, her creator found that she would judge every piece of music she heard on whether Daisy would love it or not – and so the character was created by a series of instinctual responses. Memory is necessarily a theme here too, which became strangely real for the author as the music of her teens brought back the times she messed up at school, fell in love and wanted something so badly it didn’t seem possible. She is Wendy Storer and she’s on the Red Blog with her Undercover Soundtrack.
Tag: piece of music
‘It’s never a bad thing to make the reader feel a bit uneasy’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Jonathan Pinnock
A change of gear this week. This is the first time I’ve hosted a writer who is talking about short stories. A lot of music lurks behind his award-winning first collection, inspiring the plots, mood and characters. Various signature songs have passed through his imagination to become a tightrope-walking couple, a doomed relationship, a person given the eyes of a serial killer and a haunting piece of music derived from nature. His name is Jonathan Pinnock and he’s on the Red Blog today with his Undercover Soundtrack.
‘The Philip Glass concerto wrote the novel for me’ – Linda Gillard, The Undercover Soundtrack
My guest this week says her novel would never have made it to publication if not for a piece of music. She’d been trying for a long time to weave two narratives together and was about to give up when by chance she listened to Philip Glass’s first violin concerto. In that piece she suddenly saw the rhythms of her characters and how they could harmonise. She is Linda Gillard, the novel is Untying The Knot and she’s on the Red Blog talking about its Undercover Soundtrack