While we’re on writing processes this week, I’ve run into an interesting issue with my playlist for my current project. (We’ve talked about story playlists before, but to sum up, I tend to make playlists for each story project with songs that fit based off lyrics, tone, and whatever floats my boat at the moment.)
I’ve had a playlist for the trilogy forever, with songs that reflect different points of all three books, and some that are reflective of characters. Occasionally I add songs, but I’ve never taken a song off.
But now, when I’m working on the third book, the playlist suddenly isn’t working. It turns out that, while listening to book three songs while working on books one and two worked just fine, I can’t listen to books one and two songs while writing book three.
On one hand, I guess it’s good that the books have gone through enough of a progression that the songs don’t work, but on the other, I don’t have enough book three-specific songs to keep me going for more than about twenty minutes.
Writing a trilogy is a bit like writing a longer novel. The points that you hit in a novel–the initiating point, the turning point, the dark moment, the climax–all happen in a trilogy as well, just on a bigger basis. (Well, and each individual novel still needs to hit them too.) So I guess it makes sense that, while a single playlist might work all the way through a single novel, it might not work for a trilogy.
But, for now, I’m going to need to spend some time trolling the airwaves. Anybody have any artists to recommend?
