A Musical Writing Exercise

Daydreams abound! Let's let music drive our imaginations!

Feb 22, 2023

Thursday, February 16…

Tonight, I went to a high school strings concert. Now, where this concert took place I won’t reveal, as I’m not looking to location dox myself right now.

I heard 9 songs from 3 different strings classes, one of which stood out among the selected pieces, that being Fantasia on a Theme from Thailand, arranged by Richard Meyer. Don’t worry about Googling it; I’ll have it linked a little farther into the post if you’d like to hear it for yourself. In fact, I highly encourage you give it a listen when the times comes.

As this 6 minute song played, I recalled a conversation I had with a friend on Discord a couple months ago about the interpretation of music. How, when we listen to a piece of music, we can come to wildly different conclusions about its message and meaning. Lyrical pieces are a little easier to decipher the intended message from the artist. After all, they often spell out their message in the lyrics themselves. However, that doesn’t leave these songs free from creative interpretation, either.

As a writer, I listen to a lot of music. I have a wide variety that I’ve personally selected, with different moods and tones depending on scenes that I’m writing. Whenever I daydream, generally the music that plays during these personal stories affects what I think about as well, and direct the story in directions I would have otherwise never explored if it wasn’t for the musical mood shift.

Point being, music can have a pretty powerful impact on our creativity, and our individual interpretations of individual pieces can also effect what scenes play in our heads, or what we are reminded of.

Listen to This Song

Even if two people - two complete strangers - listen to the same piece of music, they can come to two wildly different conclusions, both about its messaging, if it has one, and what they think of as they listen to the piece as a whole. Today, however, this is a writing exercise, and thus I aim more for discussing what sort of story we interoperate from a single piece of music.

I invite you all to take this journey with me. For some, this will be easy. I myself tend to map onto music characters I already have in my head, of which I have many. For others, without this sort of ready map or due to other factors, this will be hard. However, no matter how highly detailed or extremely basic your interpretation is, I’d like for you to listen to the music piece below all the same and take notes about what you imagined, either throughout the video or at the very end. If you’d like to take it one step further you can also document timestamps, too.

Crafting My Interpretation

While I pride myself in coming up with stories rather quickly, when listening to a new piece of music for the first time I don’t always think of something right away. Usually I have an easier time with lyrical music rather than orchestral/instrumental for first-listen ideas, so this is a song I had to play a couple of time to formulate my ideas around it.

Notes

Start - 1:14: Ica → Isaac (and maybe Anya) in the crowd
1:15 - 2:01: Castle → Sam and Devin looking out at the water from on high
2:02 - 2:36: Cassie does stuff*
2:37 - 3:45: Infirmary → Jae + other Healers
3:46 - 4:30: Tent → Ezra is trying to prank Ishtar probably
4:31 - End: Boat → Mathew doing pirate things

*The third portion I had a difficult time assigning a specific scene to, so I moved on to the rest of the song first just to see what I wanted at different times. Adding in all six of the Generals across the song was an accident; originally it was only three or four of them before I started to write this all out, so I didn’t want to exclude Cassie with all said and done.

General thoughts on the piece

With how the song is paced and played at different times, I felt like it’d take an immense effort (and some spoiling) to try and string one singular narrative through the piece. Doable? Yes, given time. But I’m not trying to go too big for this exercise.

However, the natural breaks in the music where the tone shifts made it easier to divide into separate scenes, and then it simply fell down to what characters applied to these scenes the best.

Granted, I am restricting myself by using The Great War, however it is what I am currently writing and thus those that have read The Great War already have these characters and settings in mind, thus leaving me with little set-up work over if I were to create an entirely new world and characters.

The plan

With my own restrictions in place, at least for this exercise, I am not tackling a story, per se, but crafting a movie or video game trailer of sorts, or even a character introduction. It is simply setting up each character, where they are in the world, and what they do in said locations.

The Great War Cinematic Trailer

We open flying over the blue ocean. The sky is bright, not a cloud in sight, and the starts faintly glittering in the distance. After a moment, we pan to Korodon and the docks of Ica, where beings are disembarking a ship.

A single pair of feet stands on the dock, and as we look up we realize it’s Isaac, who stares at the busy crowd of the large town before him. He looks worried for a moment, before taking a deep breath and pressing onward.

We get brief glimpses of the seaside marketplace, full of colorful stalls with jewelry, food, pottery, woven rugs and baskets, and all sorts of mystical items such as carved staffs and opaque crystal balls. Through the busy crowd we catch glimpses of Isaac pushing his way through the beings around him, trying to navigate his way through the town.

We wait for him where the crowd parts, and he emerges a moment later, staring back at the beings behind him with slight annoyance before looking ahead of him, and as the music crescendos we turn to see the large castle of Korodon looming over us in the distance.

We fade into a slow pan of the castle’s enclosed garden, viewing brightly colored flowers and vibrant green bushes, the grass neatly trimmed. It’s empty, with a soft breeze rustling the plants.

The scene shifts, and we see the back of Samuel as he’s sitting on a bench, looking out over the glittering ocean by himself, his hair gently floating in the breeze. After a moment, Devin walks into view and sits down next to him.

We then cut to facing their fronts. Samuel looks over at Devin, who offers him a single Sweetleaf from his hand. Samuel accepts the treat with a smile, and the two turn to the ocean once more as the prince pops the Sweetleaf into his mouth. After a moment, he says something, and though we don’t know what was said, the pair laugh as we slowly turn away from them and to the ocean once more, watching the waves roll past.

As the music picks up we hard-cut to a room lit in red light. It’s a bar, and a bloody fight has clearly taken place here. We jump to beings laying on the floor and in the midst of broken furniture, battered, bloodied, and unconscious.

We then see a stack of heavy items being stacked against a door. This singular being appears terrified, but from what we don’t know yet.

The door suddenly rattles, causing the being to jump ever so slightly. It rattles again, the wood splintering and the barricade shifts. Flames leap through the gaps in the door with the third rattle, and the being scrambles to hide behind a desk still standing the center of the room. The fourth time the door finally bursts open, and a roaring fire turns the barricade to cinders. We see the silhouette of a woman step into the red-lit room, fire curling around one of her hands, revealing her long nails that shape her fingers into claws. She lifts her hand to her face, lighting up Cassie’s bloodthirsty smile as she stares down at the desk where the being is hiding. She extends her hand, and fire fills our vision.

The next thing we see is the inside of the infirmary at Eros, where Healers rush around trying to tend to as many of the wounded as they can. We see some bent over cots and sleeping beings, others dashing up and down the tent between them carrying armfuls of bandages and bottles of medicine.

We then see Jae emerge from the storage area, joining her fellow Healers by passing out supplies and bringing sheets to place over those that could sadly not be saved in time.

There’s a short montage of Jae with Healers, where she consoles one outside of the infirmary, where she stands praying over a sheet-covered cot with two others, where she passes out supplies to others, and where she herself is tending to one of the wounded. Her scene ends with Jae sitting outside the tent, alone, staring up at the sky above her, which is now turning dark, the stars glittering overhead.

The stars fade into a painted scene on a clay pot, one that Ishtar is painting. She sits on the ground in the center of an orange tent lit by lamplight as she works on her art. Behind her, we see a sand cloud swirling in the air, shifting its shape as if it were trying to decide how best to approach. As it reaches out for her shoulder, Ishtar immediately turns to look behind her, and as she does so the sand cloud zooms out of view.

She turns back to her pottery after a moment, and the sand cloud descends back into view in the shape of Ezra. He appears to be smiling and snickers to himself, once again returning to zooming around behind his sister, waiting for his opportunity to strike. When he tries to reach out for her again, Ishtar whips around, leaving Ezra with barely enough time to hide from her once more.

She returns to her pottery, clearly agitated, bracing for something to happen. This time, Ezra doesn’t reappear just yet. After a brief moment of Ishtar appearing uneasy, she lets out a sigh and seems to relax back into her art, only for a mass of sand to descend on her head. When next we see her face, she’s scowling, as the sand that fell on her flies up to reform Ezra, who floats around laughing hysterically.

We then fade to the ocean once more, gliding up on one of the Guardians’ Island Destroyers. As we pass over the deck we see Guardians overseeing deckhands as they set about pulling ropes and cleaning the floorboards. We then enter the stairwell and descend into the bowels of the massive ship, passing Guardian patrols as we weave around corners and stairs, eventually emerging in the sleeping quarters of the pirates, where we see large groups partaking in games or drinking while others lounge on their blankets. As we pass by these pirates, we eventually land on Mathew, sitting alone, staring at the scene with a small, disapproving frown.

The scene then cuts to the cannon hold, where pirates are hauling large bags of Sparkpowder to the oversized cannons. We see Mathew at the top of a ladder, resting one of these bags on his knee as he slices it open with his sword, then turns to dump its contents into the waiting maw of the cannon. The cannonballs are then dropped, the pirates standing back as they watch the cannons tilt forward into place, ready to fire. We see Mathew standing with his hands over his ears as a Guardian raises their arm high, bringing it down sharply a second later.

We see the flair of the cannons firing, and we see a shot of dirt and debris floating in the ocean after. As the music picks up, we are brought back to the sleeping quarters where the pirates are now celebrating, holding up large frothing mugs in the air as they dance around the floor, the sleeping blankets and bags pushed out of the way.

Mathew stands by himself, staring at the celebration expressionless, when he is then approached by Lorn who offers him a mug. This brings a small smile to Mathew as he takes the mug and the two toast. Just as Mathew tilts his head back to take a swig, we pull out of the room and subsequently the ship as it travels through the night, the ocean reflecting the sparking sky above, fading to black as the music ends.

Thank you for reading this long-winded creative rant. If you’d like to subscribe and contribute to my 20 subscriber goal for this year, I greatly appreciate it, along with getting notifications of when I post new chapters of The Great War, any other future projects, and more Author’s Corner posts, where I’ll write more community writing exercises like this one and provide updates on publications I’ll be featuring in and publishing myself.

Did you participate in this exercise? What was your interpretation of the music above? Most of all, how did you like this post? I love getting comments, as feedback is how I improve my posts and overall creative writing.

Shorts and Stories

Discussion about this post