On the record.
A long time ago in a century far, far away, before cassettes, CDs, MP3s, streaming – there were records. In my house growing up, it was country music 24/7. Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Emmylou Harris, Don Williams. And then when I finally got a record player of my own, it was Stevie Nicks, Prince, Madonna, Duran Duran. Lots of Duran Duran. There was something about the feel of the vinyl, the static as the needle found its groove, the sound of one record ending and the next dropping down – it was hypnotic.
In the first rental house we lived in after my parents divorced, the record player was in a corner of the dining room. I spent a lot of afternoons stretched out next to the speaker on the scratchy green shag carpet, my head buried in my arms, listening to the Pretty in Pink soundtrack over and over again. I’d make up stories to every song, sometimes re-creating my own reality, sometimes inventing characters and storylines in my head.
For me, some of the best flash fiction stories ever are actually song lyrics. Every word is important because there are so few of them. The first time I heard Castle on the Hill by Ed Sheeran, I kept going back to this one 6-line section. In 33 words he tells me everything I need to know about the fate of the protagonist’s childhood friends.
One friend left to sell clothes
One works down by the coast
One had two kids, but lives alone
One's brother overdosed
One's already on his second wife
One's just barely getting by
I can’t exactly strap a record player on my back when I go on runs, so now I bring my phone, which really isn’t the same. It’s like bringing my whole life with me – work emails, junk emails, texts, social media, calendar reminders. Drowning it all out is hard. But when I turn off my notifications and turn up the music, I can almost get to that place I used to find on the carpet of that rental house way back when. My mind opens up, shifting into story. More often than not, I feel my way through a scene I need to write by listening to a song on repeat. It’s like I embody my characters, experiencing the music the way they would.
It was the lone drumbeat in the intro to a song by A.A. Bondy that introduced me to Jules, the 16-year-old girl in my novel who’s trying to navigate life after her sister’s death. Whenever I feel lost about what to write next, I go back to that song. I have a whole playlist for Jules now with everything from Mazzy Star to Wintersleep – these songs will forever be tied to her.
A writer told me once that the reason Young Adult writers choose to write YA is that they’re actually still working through their own unresolved adolescent issues – and I’m pretty sure that’s true. I’m on the fourth draft of Jules’s story and woke up the other morning with a new character in my head. Her name is Chloe and she listens to the song Loner by Dehd. The rest of her story is TBD – but I can’t wait to get to know her.
