Home » Music And Manuscripts: Why I Couldn’t Have Written My Bestseller Without A Soundtrack

Music And Manuscripts: Why I Couldn’t Have Written My Bestseller Without A Soundtrack

October 10, 2016 | By Holly Seddon | Reply More

“Music thudded through Amy’s body and seized her heart,” My debut novel Try Not to Breathe begins.

“Music so loud that her eardrums pounded in frenzy and her baby bird ribs rattled. Music was everything. Well, almost everything.”

The word music appears three times in the first 30 words, and with good reason. It’s at the heart of the book and in the heart of this author.

x7bf0ch6 Like my character Amy, I turned 15 in 1995. And just like Amy, music felt like everything to me. As teenagers, you don’t have a lot else by which to say who you are and what you believe. Music helps us put words to feelings we can’t articulate yet, it makes us feel less alone with our thoughts, and it helps us to try out the different ‘hats’ that we must wear along the way to settling – hopefully – on who we really are.

The process of developing a character on the page is very similar, and for me as a writer, I couldn’t have done that without a soundtrack for each of them.

When I first started to write Try Not to Breathe, I knew from the start that the historical action would take part during the Brit Pop years. The first logical step then, was to create a Brit Pop playlist on Spotify. I wasted hours tinkering with that whenever procrastination took hold, but it was genuinely useful. And when the book was finally published, six years after I wrote those opening lines, that Brit Pop playlist became the soundtrack to my launch party.

Music continues to be important throughout Try Not to Breathe, both to add atmosphere and cultural nods for the reader and to help the lead character, journalist Alex, engage with a victim who appears unreachable.

While writing, I created several playlists and listened to them to get me into the mood to write those sections. And with music as the hook to hang other research off, I also used Pinterest to collect up pictures of the Brit Pop stars that my character Amy would have loved.

small-2-approved_trynottobreathe_102615_page_4 I’ve written three novels now, Try Not to Breathe is out already and Don’t Close Your Eyes is due to be published next summer. Another is sitting, biding its time. In all three, music isn’t just essential for atmosphere, it’s woven into the plot itself. Not as a gimmick, or even a conscious decision, but as something that happens naturally whenever I write. I think a big part of this comes about for practical reasons.

All of my books so far have featured two or more timelines, often taking a character from childhood through to the present day. Carefully gathering different music for different times in a character’s life can be incredibly useful when you’re struggling for inspiration. I’m not going to lie, sometimes I don’t want to be back in 1989 writing from the perspective of a child. Or in the late nineties writing from the perspective of an angry teenager.

In those moments, listening to the right music can help to manufacture memories and feelings. Want to feel cross in a specifically nineties fashion? Rage Against the Machine can burst through any writers’ block.

And music is so frequently a marker of wider issues. The politicized rock of the eighties, the hippie sentiments of the sixties, the raw punk anger of the seventies, even novelty records over the years tell a story we’ve often forgotten. Every track is a snapshot, a time capsule. Digging into it can add that sprinkle of authenticity that it’s so hard to design but impossible to miss when you see it.

I’ve recently been playing with an idea for a screenplay. I made notes, I created character cards, I read up extensively on how to format a screenplay… I didn’t really actually write anything until I let myself imagine the sound track. Yes, putting the horse before the cart but if I didn’t, there’d be no cart. Frankly, I don’t actually know how to create something that does not have a musical heartbeat running through it, and I don’t really want to try.

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In 2016, Holly’s first book, TRY NOT TO BREATHE, was published across the world. Her next book, DON’T CLOSE YOUR EYES, will be published in summer 2017. When she’s not writing or talking about how music, she’s hanging out with my miniature schnauzer Arnie and trying and failing to wrangle four children.