Music in Writing

Recently I came across a thread about including lyrics in fiction, which was in itself, just a passing topic from someone who probably wanted to include like, Adele, in their writing because it just really resonated with them.

Hint: This is why writers have soundtracks/playlists for their books.

The general consensus was that lyrics and music have no place in novel writing. The rationale was, why would you ever use someone else's words in your story (which is kind of a silly thing to say if you think about it...we are always using other people's words to tell our own stories). And that lyrics without music imparted no significant weight to the text.

The thing is. It's not really like that.

I would totally use my own book for this example, but it's not really that...published. Or well-read. So, I'll use The Hunger Games. I'm sure many people read that series thinking the made up song "The Hanging Tree" was a made up song. Well...sort of.

Do you want to know what reading The Hanging Tree did for a woman from coal country with olive skin, a long braid and a husband who convinced her to bring children into this god-forsaken world? (ehem, me) Immediately I had "Hangman" in my head.





This is a song I sing to my children. A song my son requests. A song that I love in all it's renditions (Led Zeppelin's Gallows Pole, for one). It's not a song. It's a story. It's a history. And it's even deeper than it's American roots. Including a shadow of it in the Hunger Games gave me an even deeper connection to the story and reinforced the shadow of Appalachian culture.

What this is then-- is not, do not use lyrics in novel writing. It's do not waste your words. You only get so many words to tell a story, and you have to make each one count.

New River Gorge: Spring 2012

Do you know how awesome a four-day climbing vacation without children is?

It's so awesome. In ways people without kids just don't understand. God, I didn't LIVE until I had kids. Now I know-- youth is certainly wasted on the young.

Beauty Mountain Road

Before kids: A seven hour drive through the backside of Virginia and across West Virginia was like...whatever. Let's just get it over with that we can start our vacation.

After kids: WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE WHE WHE WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

Since it's early in the season, we camped at the Army Core of Engineers Campground at Summersville Lake. After Memorial Day this place is booked for the summer, but before Memorial Day it's first come, first served.

It was a great campground, but we were there-- awake-- like four hours total? Which is awesome. If you aren't hurting and dreaming about a soft mattress on your vacation, you've failed.

I'm not super motivated to write about the trip. So here's the summary:

• I on sighted and led for the first time- both which left me hating climbing and feeling pretty damn miserable about myself as a climber.
• Then I figured out the crux of a 5.10 (got 3/4's of the way through and over the crux before we had to leave) and felt better.
• Me and the husband had some great conversations about climbing, fear and our life.
• I discovered that fear is holding me back in my real life, my writing life, and in climbing.
• Nothing feels as good as climbing and hiking all day, followed by cold beer, hot food and a sleeping bag.
• I had a few moments during the vacation that made me feel like my book (re: formerly known as Black Mountain Ash/Crank, but has a new name I will share later) was real and my characters were out there climbing together. It was strange and wonderful.

Facing my Fear of Monsters

After finding the courage to tackle my fear of death and drive the final stake keystrokes into the heart of my very first book, I took my leftover courage and glanced across the yard at the little monster tied up by the shed, waiting for me.

I'd left him totally discouraged. He obeyed every command. He was appropriately mean, scary, snarling and drooling. When I looked over he kind of growled at me from the corner and then went back to sleep. Just like I taught him. I had what I wanted-- a monster WIP that was under control, manageable despite his size and something I totally understood.

But I pursed my lips and my new courage stirred in my chest. My monster was all sorts of wrong.

In controlling him, I'd taken away anything that was interesting. Out of my fear of letting him get to big, I'd starved him to skin and bones.

I had to let him loose. He needed to forage in the wilderness, get his monster groove back and return to stalk my yard with his temperament totally his own.
I needed him to be big and powerful. I needed to wrestle with him on the verge of my limits, using all my skill to bring him into a compromise of submission. I needed to always be fearful he would run away from me to return to his wilderness home. I needed to discipline without breaking his spirit. Oh no wait. That last part is about my three-year-old. My bad.

So today, I got the courage to walk over there and unchain him. He's rolling in the grass right now. I hope he strays from my clearly cut path. I hope he wanders into parts of the dark wood I'm afraid to go.
I hope I have the courage to follow.

Source: piccsy.com via Fer on Pinterest

I love having a blog. Where else can I write extended, crappy metaphors for my writing life? Nowhere else I tell you. NOWHERE ELSE. Because in real life, no one wants to listen to this kind of dribble. But on the internet, the "audience" is inherent.

Facing Down Death

The End.

I am afraid of the end. The true end. Where you got it "right" (finally) and you've done all you can to shoot yourself in the foot sell it.
The end is where you know you can't go back anymore.
Where the people you've created on your keyboard are alive, breathing, and people in their own right.
And now you must kill them.
By typing The End.

And you mourn the loss. You imagine writing a trilogy (because isn't that what everyone is doing these days?). You try and figure out how you can re-write the entire thing again.

But it's truly the end.

It's time to move onto the life and deaths of other people.

So you cry to your friends who will understand crying over an imaginary world, full of imaginary people. And said friends will remind you about your other projects.
You'll sniff and feel like it's okay. You'll remember how much you like these new people you're writing about. And how terribly messy their story is.

And it will ease the sting while you type it.

The End.

A Novel Album

Because an obscure, un-published writer's blog with one reader (Hi!!) is the only place to share ridiculous art projects done during "final read/edit for *if* anyone with a partial wants a full"

Re-visiting an old friend.

Source: travelthisworld.tumblr.com via Anastasia on Pinterest

Lily, the main character of the young adult novel I'm querying, has been with me since I was fifteen.
She started as an awkward, tough dirtbike rider with a crush on her best friend, and an annoying and creepy jerk admirer.
She evolved through a coming of age drama with a makeover that my fifteen-year-old self desperately wanted (because it's every girls dreams to put on the right shirt and suddenly be SMOKIN') and that annoyed me (because if the guy shows interest in you because you suddenly put on a nice shirt, he might secretly like boys...)
Then, sitting in the gas station in Edgewater, MD on my fourth wedding anniversary, she turned into a wakeboarder.
And the annoying, creepy, jerk admirer became the boy she was meant to be with. Funny how life changes your perspective between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five.
She grew beyond wish-fulfilment, into her own person. From Lauren (her original name) to Lily.

I got to write about a place I love and give a nod (or two) to my husband's teenage years. Lily made it easy to keep trying-- to keep writing-- and to stay humble and learn. I wanted to tell her story. I didn't know the story when I started writing, but after ten years, I figured it out.

I'm winding down the queries. Only a few people left who either have her or will get a query...
I hope she sells. I hope the sun doesn't set on her little corner of the Chesapeake. But if it does, at least her story's been told.

Multiple times. *rolls eyes*

       

Without Rocks There Would Be No Words

Climbing and writing have been parallel journey's for me. I never set out to "be a rock climber" just as I never thought "I want to be a writer." They've just been on the edges of my entire existence.

I remember the first times my hands touched rock and pulled, just as I remember the first times my hand touched a pen and put words to paper. But it was playing. Always playing. Never a passion. Not a love. Just something I liked and always had plans to do more of someday.

Until I had my first baby. Having my son was like the earth stopped spinning and then reversed directions. Everything was the same, but then again, everything was different.

A little over a year after I had him, I went out climbing for the first time in a few years. Great Falls National Park on a steamy July afternoon. The chalk was gummy. The climb supposedly easy. My legs quivered. My hands slipped. It took me twenty minutes of hang-dogging to ascend the 5.6 on a top-rope.

And when I touched the bolts at the top, something huge shifted into place for me.

I fell in love with climbing. I committed to falling. To failing. To being a climber with no apologies for my fitness, lack of fitness, lack of technical skill, skill, time in the harness or any other component. I fell in love with what I was on the wall, what it revealed about the world around me, and the bond it built between me and my husband.

And at the same time, I realized I could do the same with writing. That it was okay to fall in love, commit and possibly fail at something.

The thing is, once I committed to the inevitable failure and accepted who I was in both climbing and writing, it became easy to learn, easy to grow and gain skill.

Oh sure, sometimes I look over my shoulder and see the gorgeous and hard-bodied ascending the 5.13d beside my 5.9 project. And it's easy to open a book and find a writer who does something so beautiful with words it crushes into my soul and erases any pride in my own work. But those are good things in their respective roles. It humbles me and inspires me to work harder, work smarter, and appreciate the road behind me.

There is still so much ahead of me. So many more words to be written. So many more climbs to be climbed.

Climb (and write) on.

A Climbing Post

I've run up on a wall in my writing. Dangling on my rope, sucking my blood and chalk covered fingers as I bitch to the belay about some stupid hold and my stupid fat-ass and why wasn't I born a better climber? A crux, if you will, on the third or fourth pitch of my epic first ascent.

Okay, bad climbing analogies aside-- I've called a time-out on my adult project to hopefully gain some more writing neuron connections. I need some time and maturity to continue pushing towards the finish.

Plus, it's that time of year, and I have a siren call:

This lovely corner and semi-roof thing going on, is calling my name so loudly, I can hear it in my basement three hundred miles away. It's the reason every time I go down the basement steps I'm swinging over to the training board to try and pinch my fingers and hang from the sloper. It's what I see when I close my eyes at night and think about West Virginia.

Four Sheets to the Wind (5.9)

Fun. So much fun. Except, I haven't finished it. There's this move here-- right here:

 I have to stub my toe into a tiny indentation in the rock, dig my torn fingernails into a sloping swell, and transfer all my weight into the traverse out of the crack, up to the roof.

The roof will be the hard part, but I couldn't get past this technical move last time.

Of course, I was twenty pounds heavier than I am now and I was only four months post-partum. At the time four months post-partum felt like a decade and clearly I was in fighting form. Until I look at photos and see what looks like a five month pregnant belly and stains on my shirt from leaking breastmilk. So no, in retrospect, four months to climbing awesomness worked out for me about as well as starting running a week after delivering (which didn't work out for me at all). Live and learn!

It haunts me. In a delicious, exciting, fun way.

*goes to hang on the sloper*

Everytime I want to eat, I go watch climbing videos on youtube. When I want to drink, I read the guidebook. I'm in training mothereffers.

Okay, let me reign the weirdness back in.

Basically, I am sitting in my basement, smelling the pine-sol scent of freshly mopped floors, with a toddler who is recently potty trained during my writing down-time and I'm dreaming of sending my projects.

All of them.

That Season

Sand in my car. Sand in my bathroom. Sand in my shoes. Sand in my shorts.

Grubby hands with cheeze-its. Grubby hands with cold grapes. Sand on the sippie cups.

Sunscreen, water and a twist of tobacco.

Sweat. Pressing fingers into flesh to check for sunburn.

The eternal walk (from parking lot to water).

The walk back.

An Update

I need to at least get in the practice of letting the world know I'm up to my ears in living and writing and this does not include blogging.

Some personal things:

1. Climbing trip for May, without children, has been scheduled.
2. The weather has been spectacular for being outside.

Writing things:

1. I'm 70% done with Black Mountain Ash. Crank. Whatever.
2. It's looking like it will end at 90-100k words. I'm thinking closer to 100k.
3. I finally found my "genre"

Okay, about genre. Plot element wise, I definitely wrote a suspense with strong romantic element. I finally buckled down and read within this genre (yeah, I know, I hadn't ever read in this genre). And I soooo did not execute this book according to genre.

No "happy" ending. Satisfying, yes.

And I kept saying "gritty" and people kept assuring me this genre has gritty-- but I don't mean violent. I mean real life depressing gritty. Gritty like the Wire is gritty. Gritty like Fight Club gritty.
Not like Hannibal Lector gritty. My reading has confirmed gritty.

I have the f-word on every page. After I edited the useless uses out. (It's not on every page, but it's there about the same number of pages)

And I've always written more literary plots, but definitely not literary execution.

So, after several waves of panic and endless searching on goodreads and amazon. I got a great idea:

1. Go to Amazon, look up "The Corner" (not fiction)
2. Look under the heading for "what other people buy who have looked at this" and scroll through until you find a novel.
3. That led me here:

I've written a suspense with a strong romantic element executed in a style and tone similar to CLOCKERS by Richard Price.

I get chills just thinking about this. I'm both afraid and excited at how much this book is coming together. It went from something I thought I'd never be able to write, a story that seemed too big, too ambitious-- and now I have 78,000 words that all mean something in Logan and Bekah's story. I know this elation will dive right back into the depths of angst in a few days (that's how the roller coaster seems to go), but for now I am grateful for every word and for every moment where I prayed for God to somehow give me the words to write the story I needed to write.

I have the first paragraph of the query nailed. The rest still needs massaged, but the bones are there.

Logan Crepeau hasn’t been on the corner since he left his reserve for the Army fourteen years ago.  Now home from the desert, the eight hours in a police uniform aren’t enough to fill the rest of his twenty-four and the inevitable re-up in the corner war. All he needs is Frank Black, the old cop flooding meth into Baltimore, in a set of substantial bracelets and he might still have a chance at staying out the game. But he’s been undercover for ten months with no end in sight, and the investigation isn’t the only thing a hit away from going hard up.

When he meets fellow rock climber, Rebekah Schultz on a weekend climbing trip out in the boonies, he sees a chance to come home from war. He thinks he’s marrying a wayward Mennonite whose greatest rebellion was the weekend with him. He knows he’s marrying a woman who’s more mountain than Mennonite. But he doesn’t have any idea how deep that mountain blood runs.

 With the city burning itself at the end of a pipe, his target showing up for his beat like he isn’t the biggest drug lord to hit Baltimore since Little Melvin, and his handler shooting hoppers in a desperate bid to save her career, bringing a wife into the mix was the last thing Logan should have done. Let alone a woman tied to his investigation by blood. And when his target takes a left turn into terrorism, trusting his traitorous, lying wife might be the only way to stop the bus packed with fertilizer heading into DC.

I still have a few things that need worked out:

1. Still unsure if I should switch to a 3rd POV. I think it could either way. The genre is all third person, but I'm already breaking the genre mold in execution, so I don't know if first goes along with that. For me, this isn't a huge deal right now because even if I change it to third, it will be a close, limited third. The story is with the people and it's deep in their heads.

2. Not sure I should go balls to the wall. I've kept things more mainstream and accessible-- my plot lends itself to this, but also, I want people to be able to read it.  So yeah, I've made decisions towards that end-- like keeping the f-word limited to good literary uses. I haven't used the n-word at all. I've written it as real as possible while bringing it out of straight reality. (a portrait of conversation, not actual conversation--- amazing advice I received).

But it will get worked out in due time.

Okay, I'll be absent again on here for awhile. Trying to get this finished and out to beta readers soon. But, I'll be back, I promise! Especially when I start querying.

A parting musical gift from my Pinterest Board for this book:

Source: youtube.com via Sarah on Pinterest