Soundtrack: The Checker
Music is critical to my creative process.
Usually when I’m writing, I have music playing. My recent story The Checker had a pretty interesting soundtrack during the drafting process. While a few readers have cited how creepy The Checker is, the music driving my creative process is more at home on a boat than in suburbia.
These Soundtrack posts are how I share some of my creative process with you. Often I’m asked “how do you come up with your stories?” Well, listening to music helps me find the story. Consider this a key part of “how I come up with stories”.
Also, if you haven’t seen my Idea Store post, that’s another way that I come up with stories. Check that post out here.
Dark Music for Stormy Seas
I stumbled onto Colm R. McGuinness through Amazon Music. His song “Hoist the Colours” set the proper mood for The Checker. As I listened on, I liked the tone and pulse of the music which let me dive into our dark main character.
Other songs like The Wellerman, Dead Horse, Roll Boys Roll also really set the droning, repeating flow that The Checker required to work. I knew repetition was a key to creating interest in the main character and these songs helped me discover it in my story.
Here’s a listen for you:
Beyond sea shanties, I also spent a lot of time with The Doors during The Checker. I knew the dark tone of some of The Doors songs would help me get into the mind of The Checker. Specifically, I was spending a lot of time with People are Strange, Light My Fire, and (my favorite) Riders on the Storm.
In The Checker, the character is obsessed with protecting their family. I found songs like Riders on the Storm to have the tone that awoke the idea of perseverance for the character.
In this story, I didn’t start with the music. I started with a trip to the idea store pulling the following off the store shelves:
Obsessive compulsive checking
Home as a safe place
Stranger in the dark
With the seed of an idea (yep, the three things above is how the story started), I remembered hearing the Hoist the Colours song and thought “Yeah, that’s where to start”. From there, The Doors just kind of showed up. Other music did as well but by the end of the story I was just listening to the above listed on repeat. It’s like I hone in on the music.
I hope you enjoyed this little behind the scenes view of The Checker. A few other Soundtrack posts spot my blog and I’d encourage you to check them out. I track the music I listen to as I write in the stories themselves so that I can share this with you all.
Enjoy and if you haven’t read The Checker yet, make sure to CHECK it out here. See what I did there? :)
Special thanks to FOTEROS on Pexels.com for the cover image.