Soundtracks

One night I was at a bar with my friend Anna and some of her music school buddies. When I say music school, I mean some horrifyingly advanced doctoral students of everything from ethnomusicology to composition. They were a neat bunch, even if most of them were talking so far over my head that I could hear only a faint zooming noise.

There was one lady who studied music in the movies, so I snagged her and made her talk to me about John Carpenter soundtracks. When I mentioned I was writing a horror novel, she got a baffled, concerned look on her face. "I don't know how a book can be really scary. I mean, it doesn't have any sound."

I hadn't considered this. When I think of the match-up between books and movies, I usually think in terms of visuals. Gore, grossness, jump scares. I don't have access to any of them. But I also don't have building strings or sinister french horns to raise the tension, or Foley art giving a nice juicy squelch to a decapitation or the chalky screech of fingernails clawing desperately at the edge of a pit.

What I do have is music to make an atmosphere and set a mood while I write. And when I say write, I'm counting the process of walking around and coming up with plot ideas or snippets of dialogue or description. I almost never have awesome ideas sitting at a computer and chewing my knuckle and clicking over to old-timey book illustrations or octopus videos. I have them walking around, listening to music to set the mood, then I play the list back to recapture the feeling when I'm trapped at my desk.

I started making mix tapes in high school, back when they were tapes. I made them mostly for my mother, a captive audience (she also read all eleven drafts of this book, she is ready to be canonized), but soon I was making them just for me. My first serious writing tape after college, when I sat in the basement of my childhood home, was 90 minutes long and constituted not only a carefully calibrated blend of tunes but served as a timing device. I had to write the entire 90 minutes every day. I mostly remember that it had Pachelbel's canon and Closer back to back.

For the last two years of writing The Other Island, I shifted the narrative from an exclusive one person point of view to three different characters. I made Spotify playlists for all of them so I could get into character as I thought about what they would do and how they would be feeling in any point of the plot.

Iris has a lot of the angsty 90s songs that were popular when I was her age. There's Gin Blossoms, Better Than Ezra, Filter, Pearl Jam and PJ Harvey. There's also a lot of spooky folk. Neko Case, Goldfrapp and Joni Mitchell give the mix a nice feminine voice.

This song by the La's sums up Iris's state in the book the best. Surrounded by the people who love her and all alone, which is maybe how she wants to be.

Cybil is Iris's mother. She's driven by fear and anger for most of the book, and she's exactly the right vintage for a lot of loud electronic therapy-fodder tunes. Ruiner by Nine Inch Nails is something she would listen to while running.

Peter has a lot of layers, and a lot of history, but by the end of the book his heart's on his sleeve. 

The reader may not be hearing the music, but I'm hoping the mood and emotions comes through.