So, my friend Jen recently introduced me to this song:
buy from itunes here: 
iTunes tells me I’ve listened to it 110 times (not counting when I listened in my car or the 10 times I listened on my iPod this morning while I took notes for Collide.)
This song is everything that anyone ever felt about love and yearning and loss. It is not, thank the heavens above, about my life. It’s not even about anything that ever happened in my life (at least not on the receiving side of things, I’m sorta kinda sure I’ve loved someone I never wanted to see again, so I guess I could’ve been loved but never wanted to be seen again…)
Anyway, my point is, sometimes music so transports me it colors everything I do and feel and write and think. And I love music for that reason. I love writing for that reason. I love sitting in a bustling coffee shop with my headphones on, and the music plays and I am transported, and the words come out.
I am the creator and destroyer of worlds.
When I was writing Broken, I sat in a coffee shop on the main street of the town in which I grew up. The coffee shop had once been a laundromat, I think, and a place that sold used video games; when it became a coffee shop I was overjoyed because it was close to where my spawn was going to preschool and that meant I could drop him off and head over there for a glorious two hours or so twice a week, and write.
I wrote sitting at the same table in the front of the store. I could look out into the street, watch the people pass. I’d drink coffee (I never drank coffee until I started writing in coffee shops) and I’d eat a plain bagel smeared with some strawberry jelly, because I was trying to lose weight and I didn’t want butter or cream cheese.
I’d finished a book I called Dirty, and I had several others I was working on, but I thought it might make sense to write another erotic novel. I’d had the idea for months and months, and I didn’t think I could write it. Broken, that is, which I was calling something else at the time. Cheater, I think, and eventually, Precious and Fragile Things — the title from a song by Depeche Mode called Precious.
I sat in the same seat at the same table in front of the window, and I put my headphones on — my iPod was new and white and like a brick; I didn’t think I’d ever fill it with music and as it turned out, I never did because it broke before I could.
I sat in that seat with my Alphasmart, not the Neo, the first one. And my iPod. And my music.
The song was What If You by Joshua Radin.
I sat in my chair, at my table, in front of my window, and I had that song on repeat as I wrote, and I cried, not caring if people stared (they might’ve, I didn’t notice) and I made words come from my head and into a document. I made a story. I took the words and I made them into something more than letters strung together with punctuation. I made them into a world.
I didn’t know if I would ever sell that book. I didn’t know if I’d sell Dirty. I didn’t know if I would ever reach the next step in my writing, and though I was grateful for where I was, I was not fulfilled. I wanted more. I didn’t know, sitting there with that song playing over and over and over again that what I was doing would work, or that it would someday become a book I could hold in my hands and which people have read and wept over just as I wept when I wrote it.
Today and yesterday and tomorrow, Unkle Bob’s Swan is that song for me now. It’s not even that it has so much to do with the book I’m writing, and it’s not about my life; it’s about the feeling that song gives me and what it makes me want to do and what it makes me want to create.
I am not uncomplicated. I am not easy. Who ever is?
I don’t sit in that coffee shop any more. It closed. And I don’t wonder if Collide will sell, because it already has. But I still sit with headphones in my ears as the soundtrack of my life plays over me as I push my cart down the grocery aisle, or as I type, or as I scribble notes in a black notebook that has the remnants of a dozen novels already inside it — as the music plays inside my head and I am transported, I think I should be walking in slow motion, my hair blowing, maybe with the ocean pushing itself onto the sand behind me and someone waiting there to take my hand.
M
PS– now it’s been 116 times.
December 6th, 2009 at 12:36 am · Link
I’m so glad you love it as much as I do. Yay for being emo together!
December 6th, 2009 at 2:49 am · Link
I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who listens to a song over and over again. I liked that song, I’ve never heard of them before. I think I need to get it.
Oh and Precious was a song I listened to again and again long ago on an early playlist. Love it.
December 10th, 2009 at 10:41 am · Link
@Karen Erickson: I wear songs out, I swear.
December 6th, 2009 at 10:31 am · Link
Great article,
I am reading in the studio where we are recording our second album. I hope the new songs will be an inspiration for you too.
Love ron x
Unkle Bob drummer
December 10th, 2009 at 10:41 am · Link
@Ron Yeadon: Thanks for commenting! Looking forward to the new album.
December 6th, 2009 at 12:55 pm · Link
This post is not only interesting, but a little moving too. I am going to go buy all these songs
December 10th, 2009 at 10:41 am · Link
@Stephanie Draven: hooray!
December 6th, 2009 at 1:11 pm · Link
Wonderful, wonderful post! I don’t think I could write without music…maybe, but it wouldn’t be near as much fun. I also find listening to certain songs help your writing so that you can give the words an extra something that they may not have had if the emotion evoked by that song wasn’t in you at just that time.
December 10th, 2009 at 10:41 am · Link
@Nancy: I love music, and I agree, Nancy.
December 7th, 2009 at 7:13 am · Link
Beautiful, poigiant, and moving post, I listen to music whilst I read, it helps to transport/connect me to that place,time and emotion within the book. Of course if I didn’t have music I’d still enjoy the book but the music gives me an additional ‘mental’ link:) At the moment I’m listening to Julie McKnight Diamond Life which is maybe not everyones cup of tea being house/jazzy type stuff, but it’s sad, desperatley sad sometimes I wonder why I’m such a glutton for punishment LOL
December 10th, 2009 at 10:40 am · Link
@Adrienne: I know what you mean. Like, why on purpose? Why make myself so emo on purpose?!
December 8th, 2009 at 3:51 pm · Link
God, I love these insights into your writing life. That’s what makes your blog so compulsively readable. Thanks as always for sharing!
December 10th, 2009 at 10:37 am · Link
@Anne Calhoun: thanks…compulsive something, anyway…
December 10th, 2009 at 2:15 am · Link
I love ‘Swans’, too! Amazing song
December 11th, 2009 at 10:52 am · Link
I’m glad I’m not the only one that creates an alternate fantasy world around songs that I listen to, and then forever after those songs will evoke a certain sense of nostalgia…based the emotions I was feeling in that world.
On the subject of Broken–was your character Priscilla based on Angela from The Office? Cuz that’s who I totally pictured.
December 11th, 2009 at 10:56 am · Link
@April: I’ve never seen The Office so…nope.