The Zen Leaf

Note: Originally posted on Boston Blooming.

For a lot of writers, music and words are pretty closely entangled, and I’m no different. Each novel I write comes with an accompanying soundtrack of songs that have become associated with some portion of that novel. Usually, the songs are a combination of those referenced in the actual text (songs important to the characters in one way or another) and those that become tangled in the writing process (mood, theme, my own energy as I write, etc).

I’ve never built a playlist for a novel before writing it. The soundtrack just sort of organically grows as I plan, take notes, outline, draft, and edit. Often, a book takes many drafts over several years to write, and the playlist blossoms out of those years. Recently, however, I set out to build a playlist for the novel I’m about to start work on. It’s not one I’m starting for the first time – the first draft was completed last fall – but it’s also not even close to final product. At the same time, the ideas that went into this novel have been bouncing around in my head for roughly seven years now, and I have a very good idea of where I want to take this story. So I built one, and listened, and refined, and became closer to my novel as I did so, writing notes and sketches, re-envisioning scenes for Draft 2 of Maldralith. In the end, the soundtrack totaled seven songs related to three different parts of this novel’s process.

Spark
Stories come from somewhere, and for me, they are often sparked from music, dreams, and little ah-ha moments. My playlist has a bit of all three, though as of yet, it’s missing a song to represent the fourth and final dimension that really made the novel come together (building a religious system based on the evolution of human psyche. Find a song that matches that, and also matches the tone of the book, and I will love you forever!).

• “I Am Anastasia” – Sponge – I’ve always been kind of obsessed with the Anastasia story, and the first seed of creating my own came when I was listening to this song back in 2007ish. It was the original spark, though it needed several others to really make the story come together.

• “Friends and Love” – Nicholas Hooper – The second spark came from a dream I had maybe a year later. It was silly, some strange story about Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy meeting in the Forbidden Forest, only he didn’t know it was her, and she kept her face hidden from him. She hated him, but he fell in love with her, and when she began to like him, she knew she could never safely show him her face. The Harry Potter aspect of it was uninteresting to me, but the idea of being forced to hide your identity from someone you cared about gave me the second dimension of this novel. This instrumental from the score of Half Blood Prince is all unfulfilled longing, a good fit for the tone of the book as well as a fun admission: why yes, Harry Potter did (obliquely) play a part in building this book.

• “Ne Me Jugez Pas” – Sawt El Atlas – In 2008, I described my general idea of this book (below) to a fellow book blogger, and he said it reminded him of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I’d never thought about it that way, despite having studied the conflict quite a bit at that point. This brought about the third spark, and when I built my two religious cultures, one loosely draws on Arab culture and language, the second on French culture and language (as I’ve studied quite a bit of French as well). Oddly, I just happened to own and love a Middle Eastern pop song sung in both Arabic and French. How’s that for serendipitous?

Theme
Theme is where the playlist got trickier. Normally, my thematic songs come out in the writing, often referenced in the text itself. Maldralith takes place in an entirely different world, however, so I decided to pull together a bunch of songs that hit on various themes that I was writing about, and see what worked. In the end, only two remained. The others, while they made sense thematically, just didn’t fit the tone of the book well.

• “Unsown” – Umbrella Brigade – There is almost always one song written by Whitey Sterling in these playlists. I’m very glad this song matched the tone, because it really speaks to the main protagonist’s situation, as everything she knows about the world is upended.

• “Vessel” – Zola Jesus – Honestly, adding this song was a joke. My protagonist is referred to as a Vessel, so the title fit. And then…it worked. Really, really well. I’d only ever listened to the song once before, and now, I’m completely in love with it.

Tone
I could not have put this part of the playlist together if I hadn’t already written a first draft. Tone is so important to a book, and from that draft, I know exactly what my story and world feel like. All of the above songs match the tone, and I added two more that were purely tone-based.

• “Pieces” – Claire Voyant – My friend Chris sent this to me years ago, and I fell in love. The words are lovely, but it’s the music, really, that makes this one special (and a perfect match for Maldralith).

• “Escape Artist” – Zoe Keating – Jason picked this one for me. I wanted another instrumental, and I thought cello would really work for the tone. I had yet to listen to Zoe Keating’s music, and so Jason, who is very familiar with it, picked one out that he thought would fit. Oh my. This is one of my new favorite songs! There’s this one moment 2/3rds of the way in where the music stops for a second and then reenters on this low, raw note that rips my heart to shreds. The whole song has this dark, brooding, dangerous undercurrent with these bursts of frenetic panic on top, and it is perfect perfect beyond perfect, the very best way to round out and finalize Maldralith’s playlist!

***
I’ve been listening to these seven songs on repeat for the last few weeks as I build notes for the next draft of novel. Under their influence, Draft 2 is taking shape, and I hope to put the first words down on it as soon as my family has resettled in Boston.

From my Writer Page:

Maldralith
Mage doesn’t know that she is the last living vessel of the goddess Maldraise, meant to lead her people into divinity. When war ripped through her childhood, she buried the knowledge and her memories in a family heirloom, and has since been raised in the opposing religious culture, enslaved by those who formerly worshiped her. Now, with the world on the brink of a new war, Maldraise leads Mage back to her memories and charges her, contrary to all she’s been taught, to unite the two sides of this religious conflict.

Note: Originally posted on Boston Blooming.

Back on the last day of April, I announced on Facebook that, four drafts and eight years to the day, I’d completed the final version of Phantom, the first novel I’d ever written. I was extremely proud of that accomplishment, as that first novel had been hanging over me for so long. My first draft was so bad, beyond pitiful, and it took three major overhauls and rewrites to get it to the mostly-final form that it’s in today.

Of course, I didn’t spend all of those eight years working on Phantom. My brain needed to rest between drafts, and thus flitted from manuscript to manuscript in that time. Some took fewer years or fewer drafts to complete. Others are still far from completion. Phantom was the most outstanding – as in “remaining to be done,” not “great” – of my manuscripts, originally begun on May 1st, 2006. The second most outstanding manuscript was Summer Rain, my second novel, begun in early 2007.

(an image I’ve associated with Summer Rain for years now)

Like Phantom, Summer Rain started out as a worse-than-pitiful draft. It was loosely (and lamely) called Eternity, and to be perfectly honest, I quit writing the book about 50k words in, it was that bad. (I know. Bad writer. I don’t do this anymore. I finish all drafts regardless of quality. Eventually.) I shelved it for later rewrite-from-scratch, keeping only a few touchstones from the original idea to carry into subsequent drafts. Draft 2 (now titled Summer Rain) was completed in late 2010; draft 3, in fall of 2012. I began the fourth-and-final draft on February 11, 2013, only to get completely stuck, 27k words into the mss, four months later. Once again, I put it aside to let it rest, and in late May this year, I brushed it off and got back to work.

Now, seven-point-five years and four drafts after I began writing this novel, it is DONE.

Well, it still needs a six-month rest and a read through with new eyes, followed by touch-ups and revisions and edits, but as far as draftinggoes, at least, it’s done. For the first time, I am very, very happy with a completed version of this manuscript, happy with the story and characters and writing. The third-to-last chapter, which I wrote just the other day, is probably my favorite chapter that I’ve ever written. I’ve reread the manuscript twice since finishing it two days ago, and both times, I just wanted to hug it. Yes, I’m a dork.

Summer Rain is about 80,000 words long – adult literary magical realism that explores the idea of dream-sharing in a modern, over-psychoanalyzed world, set in a fictional smallish town in Wisconsin. A huge component of writing the book involved world-building: names and descriptions of shops, bakeries, restaurants, bars, motels, parks, offices, churches, cemeteries, schools, and physical landmarks (Jason was instrumental to this!!). I had to draw out a detailed map of the city, complete with every single street name and business. It was a tedious process, to be honest, but it made the writing fun afterwards, because Phantom is also set in this fictional town, and I got to weave in little ties between the books. Phantom’s narrator shows up for two seconds in a diner in this book. One of its supporting characters gets an awkward high school relationship story in Summer Rain. Two characters who are barely mentioned in Phantom are fairly major characters in Summer Rain. Frickin’ awesome. I love when novels intersect like this!

Fun facts about Summer Rain:

Because I’ve been working on this manuscript for so many years, it has drawn on a lot of personal experiences. I always find it fun to look back on final manuscripts and see all the references that someone close to me might pick up on. There are dozens of them in this novel, some of my favorites being a particular photo I took in Venice in 1999 (below), an experience I once had at a concert, an antique/craft store I visited in Rice Lake (WI), a giant willow tree at Mound View Park in Platteville (WI), and multiple references to things that happened to Jason and me the first week we met in person.

(photo of a painter and her subject)

It’s also fun to take a look at my research history for a manuscript. Just off the top of my head, a couple of my researches for Summer Rain included:

• symptoms and treatment of erotomania
• coffee shops on State St in Madison, WI, open from 2003 to present
• common/iconic trees in Florence, Italy
• mythological differences between pixies and sprites
• treatment for a sprained ankle for a five-year-old
• specialty flavors of Coke available in 2000
• lucid dreams and recurring nightmares, in contrast to regular dreams or nightmares

Then, there’s the playlist for the novel. Nearly all of my manuscripts eventually pick up a few key songs that I associate with the story, characters, scenes, or specific emotions in the novel. Summer Rain has acquired six of them over the years:

• “Better Man” by Pearl Jam
• “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen (and many variants thereof)
• “The Great Below” by Nine Inch Nails
• “Gnossienne No. 1” by Erik Satie
• “Alien” by Bush
• “English Summer Rain” by Placebo
• “Lonely No More” by Rob Thomas

Needless to say, after nearly eight years, Summer Rain has become one of my precious babies. It’s been a painstaking process, and we’ve come a long way with each other. I look forward to letting it rest, so that I can do final edits and eventually start the submission process. And, how serendipitous is this? I got to write that wonderful last word – End – a mere two days before my Writer’s League of Texas Agents and Editors Conference. I won’t be pitching it there, of course, as it’s too newly-finished, but I still love the fact that I completed it just in time. Perfect.

Last but not least, I want to send a quick shout-out thank you to my cousin Jen and my Monday writing group for helping me carve out time to write (especially now that the boys are home for the summer), to my fellow writer Stephanie who encouraged me to keep pushing to finish even when I was stressed with all this relocation stuff, to my cousins Gina and Nate for taking my boys for an entire day and giving me that time to write while I was in the home stretch, to ALL my blogger friends who keep telling me they want to read something I’ve written one day, and to Jason for always being there to answer any random query (“Quick: What’s a common last name for this part of Wisconsin?” “What movie do you think they’d watch on DVD in late 2012?” “What’s another popular look for women from the flapper era that’s not flapper?”). Love you guys. 🙂