How a playlist can help you edit your novel
It's true you can work on a book without writing any words. Here's how music can help.
It took me three books before I thought to put together a playlist for my WIP. I have always been ‘into’ music, stemming from my consciously self-aware teen days. You know the kind. I would curate playlists with the focus of a film composer for the sole purpose of romanticising my rainy bus ride home from school. Then, my clacky iPod held the perfect combination of introspective Indie music and film track nostalgia so that I could imagine I was A Sad Girl protagonist staring out of the rain splattered window. I made an assumption that Someone Cool might look over my shoulder at any given moment, therefore Bloc Party and Belle and Sebastian had to feature in the right order.
I am a mood driven writer. Frequently in Q&A’s and interviews, I talk about the historical novel that I abandoned because it was too dark and left me hanging over my desk after each writing session, like a Victorian poet after an opium come-down. I’m often told that the novels I have written (the ones I did manage to finish without having an existential meltdown) are contemporary and uplifting, but also dark in terms of theme (and humour). I write my first drafts after outlining the book chapter by chapter, but one of the biggest challenges I face when it comes to tackling The Big Edit is the cadence of tension.
Of course, there’s a sense that characters have to change by the end of the book. Conflicts occur, resolutions are made, and through all this, pace has to be maintained. Characters who fight all the time are exhausting, but characters who are too rooted in the ‘fun and games / figuring shit out’ stage are kind of boring.
I spent too long trying to write on scene cards, colour code excel sheets, and put sticky tabs on my wodge of a manuscript. For me, those methods work further down the line, perhaps after two edits, but it’s just not practical to begin with, when I’m still trying to feel the shape of the story. What’s more, life is busy. Through a playlist, I’ve tried to figure out a way of editing that I can feasibly do in my head. Stick with me here, it isn’t woo-woo. This method is about repetition. It’s about becoming so familiar with your story that scenes, dialogue, and changes of tone take shape in your mind when you hear the playlist, whether that’s in the car, on the bus, nursing your baby, cleaning the bathroom, or walking to work.
When I was editing The Wedding Crasher, we were desperately trying to renovate an incredibly tired and grubby flat to a liveable condition. Alas, my deadline didn’t go away. This saw me writing, pausing to sand an architrave, driving to the hardware shop for brushes and screws, and getting back to laptop again (which was often balanced on the top wrung of a stepladder) in the same afternoon. I needed something that could maintain space for my story in the hours and days I couldn’t work on the document itself. Thus, a playlist.
Here’s how I did it.
I’ll cover:
Choosing an anthem
Tackling The Big Edit
Using one song per chapter
Establishing an emotional arc
Using lyrics
Playlists are plot
Tweaking song orders
Editing in dead time
Release the playlist as a reader magnet
But first, here’s the playlist itself, annotated for extra writing nerd points.
