How to use music to generate writing ideas — This Is Fictional #6
How to use music to generate writing ideas — This Is Fictional #6
Your weekly dose of all things creative writing: How to get creative writing inspiration from music, writing opportunity of the week and treats for the eyes and ears
Hello This Is Fictional subscribers!
Right now, I’m probably just waking up, eating toast or — if we’re being optimistic — already drying my hair in preparation for my cousin’s wedding today! Like my other posts, this has been scheduled ahead of time.
I hope you have a fun weekend ahead of you.
Here’s what I’ve got for ya this week…
How to get creative writing inspiration from music.
Writing opportunity of the week: an international poetry competition with a prize of €1,000 and publication for the winner.
Something to watch: behind the scenes of a prolific author’s writing routine.
Something to read: a highly-anticipated collection by a STUNNING poet.
Something to listen to: an author reading an excerpt from their debut novel on a great lit podcast.
How to use music to generate writing ideas
Last year, I wrote a flash fiction inspired by a certain AMAZING song by 60s/70s rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival. If you’ve never heard it, do yourself a favour and play it now.
I’ll explain how this came about. But first, here’s the story I wrote:
Bad moon a-rising
Whenever there was thunder on hot summer nights, my gran would hurry from her armchair to the window and watch the clouds kneading over themselves across the sky. She’d giggle and say, “There’s a bad moon on the rise.”
I’d smile back at her. But I never understood why she said it. Not until she went into hospital. We were looking under her bed, trying to find her favourite slippers, and instead found a box of vinyl and photographs.
In one picture, splintering at the edges, was my gran. Caught mid-dance, arms splayed, flares kicking, waist-length hair sweeping overhead in a cartwheel. On the back, she’d written: Creedence Clearwater Revival, Oakland, CA, 1970. There were dozens more from concerts across the States that year.
My gran: the sweet old lady, hunched by gravity to half my height, who gave me rhubarb and custard sweets by the handful like they were produced in her pocket. The woman who barely tapped a toe to the radio. The doting, cuddly granny with white clouds for hair, who cried at kids films on Saturday afternoons and always looked old to me. But sometimes, when caught in the right light, she had started to look somehow like a baby at the same time. The same woman was in these photographs.
On her final night, just before she drifted away, I looked at the moon from the hospital window. I stared until a film came over my eyes, blurring the milky blue light on the trees and tarmac and signs and roundabouts and houses laid out in the distance like dominos ready to tip. I knew it would be her last moonrise and part of me wasn’t sad.
She’d headbanged with the best of them, felt the bass from towering speakers thrum in her chest, let guitar riffs soak into her bones, screamed the lyrics to her favourite songs with a room full of strangers who, in that moment, probably felt like family. When the show finished, maybe she sank pints of cheap beer and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes in a blissful afterglow, ears ringing and lips numb from kissing an American boy.
My gran: the sly old fox who travelled from a small Scottish town to witness the tail-end of the summer of love with her own eyes and never said a word about it.
I wish I could have met the version of her before kids, before grandkids. I’d never known the world without her but she knew it before me.
This story was born when I was in a bit of a writing slump. I’d been trying to come up with an idea for a new story or poem. But nothing was grabbing me.
I was on a CCR kick at the time and decided to step away from my desk and put my headphones on. I blasted ‘Bad Moon Rising’, a song I first discovered through my husband who plays it at local band nights. Somewhere between I see earthquakes and lightnin' and one eye is taken for an eye, I started thinking about what it would’ve been like to see CCR live during the summer of love or later in the 1970s. I loved the phrase ‘bad moon rising’ and I liked the idea of playing with it and adding my own interpretation.
I quickly had a first draft and then spent more time tweaking every sentence, adding and removing words, tiny scenes and descriptive vignettes.
Fancy trying out something similar? If you like the idea of using music as inspiration for your creative writing, here are some exercises to try:
Pick an obscure, lesser-known song from one of your favourite bands or artists. Pull up the lyrics so you can read them as you listen. Play the song a few times until a particular turn of phrase jumps out at you. Or visualise what a music video for this song would look like. Use whatever comes to you as the basis for a new piece of writing.
Go on Spotify and randomly select a song you’ve never heard of by an artist you’ve never heard of. Choose your favourite lyric and use it in isolation as a writing prompt or opening line.
Just listen… Put on your favourite song, listen with headphones and sit still with your eyes closed or dance around in your pyjamas. Focus on either the meaning of the lyrics or the feeling you get from the song, the rhythm and beat. Once the song has finished, go straight to freewriting with pen and paper.
Writing opportunity of the week
This one is for the poets! Established to recognise excellence in the craft of poetry writing and provide a platform for publication, the Anthology Poetry Competition is open to original and previously unpublished poems written in English.
Entries are welcomed from poets of all nationalities, living anywhere in the world.
There is an entry fee of €10 but the winner will receive a €1,000 cash prize and the chance to see their work published in a future issue of Anthology. The winner will also receive a one-year subscription to Anthology.
Treats for the eyes and ears
Something to read
It’s a bit weird to recommend something you haven’t read yet. But I just know in my bones that this will be amazing.
Poet Joy Sullivan’s first ever book of poems Instructions for Travelling West comes out April this year. I pre-ordered my copy months ago and I’m so excited to sink my teeth into it! Joy has spoken online about how important pre-orders are for authors, especially debuts. So, here’s the link if you want to pre-order your copy.
I’ve been a huge fan of Joy for years and I love, love, love her poems. Her unmatched command of language, delicious imagery and lyrical word-weaving is enough to make my inner writer feel like a talentless little goblin in comparison 😂 Here’s one of my favourites — click on the post to read the whole poem:
P.S. Go follow her on Substack! Her newsletter Necessary Salt is one of my all-time favourites. She’s created such a lovely community here and over on Instagram.
Something to watch
I’ve always been fascinated with the minutiae of how other writers write. Maybe I’m just nosy. And I love seeing the spaces where people write too. Both of these boxes are ticked in this video with prolific author Jerry B. Jenkins. I’m very jealous of his writing setup. He also shares lots of great writing advice. Give it a watch!
Something to listen to
I mentioned last week that I’m reading Emma Cline’s short story collection and it got me thinking again about how much I loved her debut novel, The Girls. Hear her reading an excerpt from the book in this great episode from Skylight Books.
Have a great weekend!
Soph x
I’m Sophie Campbell, a word-obsessed fiction writer, poet and creative writing facilitator. I’ve had short stories, poems and flash fiction published by The Woolf, Surely Mag, Bright Flash Literary Review and Razur Cuts (including their Finest Cuts edition), among others. And I won the poetry prize in Bold Types, GWL’s Annual Scottish Women's Creative Writing Competition 2023.
I’m also a freelance creative content writer and strategist for writing tools and communities. I write blogs, emails, eBooks and web copy for literary business owners and brands who are building software, a physical tool or an online community to help writers hone their craft.
In essence, I’m a writer writing for businesses who cater to writers. Meta, I know.
Are you a budding writer who wants to chat about any and all things creative writing? Or a writery business owner or marketing manager who needs a go-to content writer? Let’s talk 💌: hello@sophiecampbellwriter.com