New Ways of Listening: Music as Creative Inhale
by Tamara Kaye Sellman
Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars. — Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary
I learned the art of the creative inhale* by accident in 2023. It came to me in the form of music.
*Creative inhale: though multiple definitions exist, here’s mine… the intentional refueling of one’s creative life and process by mindful exposure to other media, forms of expression, disciplines—music, for instance, or dance, film, paintings, theater, poetry—always aligning to narrative as one’s true north.
I say "by accident" because it’s really unlike me to mash up music and writing.
It’s funny. Music ought to be an obsession for me, given my GenX OG status (’65). But, as with so many other of my personal pop-culture leanings, I’ve lived the life of an outlier, enjoying all kinds of music without becoming a material curator of any of it.
(I hope I don’t lose my GenX cred over that confession, but if you remember Lloyd Dobler’s monologue in Say Anything, you’ll recall that it dripped with anticapitalist, antimaterialist sentiment, which more or less describes my ethos.)
Not that I don’t enjoy music. Quite the contrary. I listen to specific kinds of music while exercising—at the gym, while hiking or kayaking, or during heavy work in the garden—if only for rhythms to keep me breathing and focused. I also like to sing loudly in the car to upbeat music (if solo) to energize myself on the way to conferences and conventions.
So I’d been at the gym last winter, listening to a brand-new workout playlist to get me through a long spinning session. And a Slack conversation broke out.
My peers in a writing critique group would often sling Slack messages back and forth to one another during my time on the bike. I often chimed in because so many of those conversations could be robust and energizing.
(In 2023, I can boast a new skill set: active Slack messaging during stationary cycling.)
It should come as no surprise that I finally conceived a possible connection between listening to music and my writing process during one of these writerly banter sessions.
It happened when I discovered the song by Big Data, “Give Me Life,” and realized it more or less matched the theme to one of my peers’ cyberpunk horror stories.
It was then that I—and my peers—began to toy with the idea of assigning a theme song to a novel in progress as a kind of emotional framing device.
Ultimately, I decided it couldn’t work. Not for me, anyway. It seems unlikely that one lone song could capture the complex essence of long-form narrative. I mean, a short story can make much of a single evocative tune, but a novel really deserves an entire score, especially my novel in progress. After all, it features:
• A present-day protagonist
• A second protagonist (recently dead) from the past whose story provides the folkloric institutional memory of the novel
• A third character from the past (long dead) who leaves behind a scrapbook of factual history, hidden but meant to be found; and
• A fourth character who just happens to be Mother Nature herself.
Each of these characters really deserves their own soundtrack, if I’m being honest.
So I let the idea drop; it seemed overly cerebral in the face of the original intention: to capture emotionality in a narrative. Anyway, I didn’t need another project. Workshops, critique groups, and other creative pursuits—and gardening—always keep me on my toes.
Then, one night not long after that, I found myself after hours updating my gym playlist (it’s in a constant state of revision, just like my novels and stories). It was then that I realized it wasn’t my novel that needed a playlist or soundtrack, but each of my characters--dedicated streams of music to capture the emotional weight of each of their arcs in the narrative.
The story itself may be the highway upon which their emotions travel, but the characters are the emotional vehicles cruising that highway.
This idea bloomed at the crocus stage of winter when I naturally begin to crave exercise outside again after months of being trapped indoors.
Gardening and hiking are my go-tos in the spring, moving meditations in natural sunlight and fresh air that I’ve come to rely upon to evolve a stuck draft. It’s a fertile time to sort out the knots of plot issues, identify structural inadequacies in the overarching narrative, or immerse myself in a character’s imagined headspace to know them better.
Sometimes these periods of intellectual disentanglement stretch for hours, but I scarcely notice the physical work at hand while I’m doing it—the sheer volume of pulled weeds or the miles spanned underfoot—for all my brain’s creative churn, aided and abetted by active listening.
Part of doing something is listening. We are listening. To the sun. To the stars. To the wind. – Madeleine L’Engle, Swiftly Tilting Planet
Afterward, I’m primed to sit down and write to capture those vibes, insights, and brainstorms.
Now this… assigning playlists to each of my characters? This made sense.
So I found myself up late again yet another night, turning in at oh-dark-thirty after creating two new Pandora collections and a whole folder of dedicated music and sound effects in my Epidemic account. The differences in their content were eye opening.
• My protagonist suffers from moral injury as a former COVID front-line respiratory therapist. She’s experienced more trauma in one year than some people ever experience in a lifetime. You can bet her playlist runs emo and dark, brooding, weepy, angry (so angry), despairing, dissociative, dysregulated, and deeply driven by anxiety.
Sample: “Heavy Rain” by Ethan Sloan
• The second character is the protagonist’s dead grandmother, who left family property for the protagonist to steward in hopes she might find its right purpose. Dead grandma’s tunes are folksy, nostalgic, and underproduced, yet laden with sonic magic straight out of the landscape. So much like my own grandmother’s music, heavy with strummed instruments and vocal harmonies, with more than one loon calling in the background. Sample: “Walk Right In” by The Brothers Four
• I must confess that the third character—a dead patriarch who left behind written mementoes that ultimately connect the novel’s past to its present—doesn’t have his own playlist. It’s not that he doesn’t deserve one, but more that his purpose in the novel is to establish objective truth through the public minutiae of newspaper clippings, underlined passages in books, and official letters. I do allow him a single confession—a secret diary entry recollecting a string of ineffable life-altering moments, which he can only tell straight because it’s his own truth, not meant for any audience.
• Finally, Mother Nature gets her own playlist. I went with music categorized by mood or theme, all of it instrumental, and sound effects that explore the “ambience” of this stretch of her remote, wild acreage… some of it tamed, some of it left to its own fertile chaos. Her sections in the novel are god’s-eye interludes gazing upon the world beyond what humans can cognitively experience—a vibe check for transitions in the narrative, certainly, but also a chance to give voice to Gaia herself. Sample: “Into Wilderness” by Placidic
Proof of concept of this newfound strategy struck the very first time I listened to one playlist: my protagonist’s moody music. I set it on Shuffle and Repeat and tuned in via earbuds. Unironically, I spent half the day mulching my mucky raised vegetable beds last spring while testing out this strategy. My writerly goal? To solve a challenging, unresolved plot point.
I wasn’t looking for emotional depth in the writing that followed after the garden gloves came off that day and I sat down at my laptop. I just wanted to find order, structure, and sensibility in my ideas.
And I did. But the playlist left me feeling like a voyeur soaking up my protagonist’s psyche. Not in a creepy way, but in an empathic way. I didn’t expect to discover how the implicit gravitas beneath the lyrics in her songs gave me more depth to understand her point of view.
From this vantage, I finally discerned how to weave the dead roots of her emotional trauma into new living soil (new relationships) and trust the unseen mycelium (fates, Nature, the sacred) to perform its resurrection magic.
What a breakthrough! Who knew that I might learn to lean into music as a tool in my writer’s process toolbox, using an approach that seemed impossible only weeks before?
It’s a kind of listening I’ve never done, at least not in this capacity or with this kind of purpose. I now read lyrics on the regular, listen for architecture in music to inform structure in storytelling, savor the moments when I notice a thoughtful redirection in a song or the power of a certain phrase or refrain.
I drink in the creative inhale now. If I cock my ear right, I can hear the breath of a story, carried out in voices and strings, drumbeats, and silence.
We breathe the light, we breathe the music, we breathe the moment as it passes through us.―Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat
Now I invite the subterranean nature of emotion in music to ping its acoustic beacon while I tease out my own storytelling puzzles, all in service to establishing order in the noisy chaos that is my unfinished novel draft.
Want to hear a sample of the sound of my brain while writing?
"Don't Wake the Trolls" by Jon Björk
Tamara Kaye Sellman's published works (poetry, fiction, journalism, and essays) have
been nominated for the Pushcart Prize or have earned other awards or
distinctions. Some places where you can find her work include Crab
Creek Review, Gargoyle, Literary Mama, Lowestoft Chronicle, The
Nervous Breakdown, NonBinary Review, North American Review, Quarterly
West, Rosebud, Spoon River Poetry Review, Terrain, and Weber: The
Contemporary West. Her first book, Intention Tremor (MoonPath Press, 2021), collects
poetry and prose forms documenting her life following her multiple
sclerosis diagnosis in 2013. She is currently at work transforming the
pieces from this book into experimental films to expand their
accessibility to the hearing and vision impaired. (And because it’s
fun.) Aqueduct Press will be publishing her collection Cul de Sac Stories in the Conversation Pieces series in 2024.
