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Writing Prompt: Music Inspiration

12 Jun

Music is often a soundtrack in our lives, the music playing on the radio the last day of school before summer, the song we dance to at our wedding, the lullabies our mom sang to us and that we sing to our own children.  Some of my favorite author’s like Carrie Vaughn in her Kitty Norville series include playlists of music that was inspirational in writing the story or that goes particularly well with different scenes in the book.  I’ve enjoyed a lot of her picks including Mr. Brightside by the Killers in Kitty Takes a Holiday.

For this week’s Writing Prompt listen to some of your favorite music and see what it inspires.  What type of romance does your favorite love song put you in mind of?  Maybe that Metal Ballad will inspire a dark fantasy story or that quirky pop hit could have the next great American novel hiding in it.  Don’t just think about the lyrics, but also the sound of the music, what could you imagine happening that would accompany it. Let your imagination go wild.  You do not necessarily need to have the story be what one would necessarily expect from the music.  Look at how the pop music of Scandinavian band Abba became a hit musical set on a Greek Island.  You can have each song represent a chapter of a novel or simply let the music play in the background as you work on a short story.

Of course, this writing prompt works great in reverse too. If you are a musician you can take inspiration from an author’s book or poem.  What type of sound do you imagine accompanying your favorite novel; break out your favorite instrument and create the perfect soundrtrack.  You could even think of transforming an older, no longer in copyright, poem into a song.  You can hear two very different versions of Poe’s Annabelle Lee, one rock and one classical available from Freegal Music.

Hoboken Library patrons can find inspiration in the many ebooks and streaming music the library provides.

We hope you have enjoyed our Friday Writing Prompts! As the library gets ready to ramp up to our reopening we will be going back to one weekly post on Wednesday, but for those that have enjoyed our Writing Inspiration posts we will continue to feature them occasionally. Best luck on all your writing endeavors!

Written by:
Aimee Harris
Head of Information and Digital Services

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Quirky Characters, a Charming Setting and Topical Issues: Louise Penny’s A Better Man

4 May

A Better Man
Take a small rural Canadian village. A bistro serving almond croissants and café au lait. A quirky cast of core characters, with a few new faces mixed in each new book of the series.

Mix in some current topical issues, in this case the effects of environmental change, social media reality and the how impressions can be shaped there by anonymity, doctored videos and the viral nature of opinions. Add other dark aspects of life, like violence against women.

What you get is a somewhat cozy mystery with enough rough reality mixed in that you won’t gag from the sweetness.

It’s a formula that is repeated throughout this now 15 book long series. Armand Gamache, an officer of the Surete du Quebec lives with his extended family in the (fictional) village of Three Pines in Quebec. He deals with various crimes (a rather shocking amount, for such a backwater) as well as issues within the Surete du Quebec. He carries the baggage of decisions he has made in his career in each new book. In this one, he is looking into the disappearance of a woman known to have been abused by her husband. He is helped by his son-in-law Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and other Surete agents that have appeared in previous books in the series.

I hesitate to make the suggestion, because it is a rather substantial reading commitment, but it really is best to read the series in order. There is enough explanation of the backstories of the major plot developments to get you through each book as a stand-alone, but your enjoyment will be deeper for seeing characters develop over time. Penny doesn’t pull any punches. She is not afraid to write main characters out of the script or involve plot twists that will shock you.

A list of the series in order from the first to the most recent is: Still Life, A Fatal Grace/Dead Cold (same book, different title), The Cruelest Month, A Rule Against Murder/The Murder Stone (same book, different title), The Brutal Telling, Bury Your Dead, A Trick of the Light, The Beautiful Mystery, How the Light Gets In, The Long Way Home, The Nature of the Beast, A Great Reckoning, Glass Houses, Kingdom of the Blind, and A Better Man.  You can find them as ebooks and/or digital audiobooks to checkout from eLibraryNJ, eBCCLS, and Hoopla.

If you require s bit more convincing, take a look at Louise Penny’s web site, which features reviews and more describing the books in detail.

What I enjoy about the series is the morality of Armand Gamache and the plotting that keeps each book both familiar and surprising. And the food! The characters frequently indulge in food and drink at the bistro or at get-togethers at the villagers’ homes that sound awesome.

Written by:
Victoria Turk
Reference Librarian

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