LiveJournal Q&A, December Edition Question #1: How Does Music Influence Your Writing?

A meme went around LiveJournal (yes I still use it! it’s awesome!). The meme was a challenge, asking for blog posts to be done for each day in the month of December. I didn’t get 31 questions, but the questions I did get were awesome. So, I’m answering them here.

It’s funny you ask this because often, writing influences my music. I have discovered over the years that while I have a core set of music styles that I like, it’s often my characters who direct certain musical choices. I’ve discovered artists and genres because a character likes a certain style of music. I’ve become obsessive over some bands because the character identifies so strongly with them that it literally changes how I think and react to it. (Current example: Sick Puppies.)

Outside of the people in my head who direct everything from music to book to clothing choices, I am personally drawn to more hard rock and heavy metal elements which means that it is more likely for my characters to listen to those genres and bands. But the biggest example of how music influences my writing is in my chosen genre, which is Rock Fiction.

It’s true that my writing is peppered with queer characters and could be labeled Queer Fiction, but in the end, my genre is rock fiction. There isn’t a book or a story that doesn’t have that hard rock element as a central part to at least one character, if not the entire plot. That musical element is what drives me as I seek to find the answers in the shadows beyond the spotlights on stage. (See what I did there?) The soaring guitar riffs tell my soul the story while the bass line fills in the gaps and the drums bind it all together. Outside of Tori Amos, I almost never write with singer/songwriters on repeat. Instead it’s Sick Puppies, All That Remains, Five Finger Death Punch, Shinedown, Queensryche, Halestorm, Royal Bliss, Nine Inch Nails, Rob Zombie, Ill Nino, Stabbing Westward, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine … they are the ones who are put on repeat as the characters run away with my soul. I fall into their music, their lyrics, their stories while the universe in my head unfolds to tell me about the guitarist who is dying of AIDS, the basketball player who is in love with the rock star, the runaway who is saved by the timeless band, the actress who finds peace in the silence of her guitarist boyfriend, the suicidal bass player who would be dead if not for the instrument in her hands, the young father who reconnects to his Spokane heritage through his lyrics.

So for me, it’s a cycle. I wouldn’t be writing at all without the inspiration I find in the music I am already drawn to, but my characters definitely expand my fascination with music because they take me on their journeys, teaching me what they like and what inspires them, which in turn, inspires me.