I Was Forced to Write a Song For My Novel

No, I didn't write a song with a melody, because I don't think anyone has invented singing book pages yet, but I did write lyrics.

I retired from songwriting years ago, but I found yesterday that it comes right back. People who try to write songs, but find it too difficult baffle me. It's almost too simple. I wrote my lyrics in less than five minutes. Granted, I'm not going to paste an entire song onto the pages of my novel, but I wrote a first verse and chorus.

Normally, I would not do this, but the scene demanded it. My main character had written a pile of songs at her mentor's request. The mentor was going into the studio and she specifically wanted to record some of MC's songs. The last one she wrote was a gamble. It was almost too personal, too specific to the mentor's life. When days went by without any response from the mentor, MC was certain she'd made a big mistake ~ that her mentor was offended by the song. She waited and waited, and finally came to the conclusion that her mentor had ghosted her.

Eventually MC resigned herself to that fact. She and her band were in the midst of recording their own album, and their producer finally convinced her to record some of the "rejected" songs she'd sent off to the mentor. 

This explanation is too long and unnecessarily complicated, but in short, MC received a notice that she had certified mail waiting for her at the post office, so on her way to the recording studio she stopped and picked it up. Then she forgot about it and left it in her car. On a lunch break, she saw the package and tore it open, to find a CD inside with no markings of any kind. She brought it into the studio and talked her producer into giving it a spin while the rest of the band was still at lunch. Her assumption was that some aspiring singer, thinking MC had some pull in the industry, had sent her an unsolicited CD, and MC would feel guilty if she didn't at least give it a listen.

She and the producer stared at one another in amazement when the first strains of the song came through the speakers. Whoever the singer was, they'd spent a lot of money on studio musicians. The arrangement was beautifully played.

Then the first line of the song hit. It was the mentor doing MC's song. So, I had to describe MC's reaction upon hearing it, and the producer's reaction, which to me would have been impossible to do without showing at least some of the lyrics. Readers (hypothetical readers) would already know by this point that the song's title was "Strong", so now I needed to write lyrics for it.

PRO TIP: Poetry and lyrics are two separate entities. One can write a poem to their heart's content, but it had better fit with a melody if they want to call it a song. First of all, there's a whole different meter involved; e.g., one line of the song might only contain a single word.

I did sort of invent a melody in my head as I was writing, and thus the lyrics didn't turn out half bad. Had I actually been trying to write a real song, I would have tweaked them a bit, but they work and they convey the theme. (I'm sure the rest of the song was even better. 😉)

Since this novel is all about music, it got to the point of silliness to not actually depict music somewhere within it. I've skated past that by inventing song titles when necessary, and I think I made up one line of a song that happened to be MC's one and only hit. Before she was discovered and signed to a label, she'd been doing cover songs with her band, but one can't include lyrics of real songs in a book without either paying a hefty fee or being sued, so that was out. It was easier to avoid lyrics all together. This was the first and only time I'll be inventing a song for the novel.  

Except...

MC keeps holding onto one particular song, one she wrote when she was at her lowest point, after she'd fled her disastrous tour and found herself back in Chance, cut off from everyone; heartbroken. Her producer is trying to convince her to shop the song to major artists, telling her it's her "money song" and would set her up for life. She adamantly refuses. 

I think that song is going to show up at some point, when the time is right. But damn, I don't want to have to go through this exercise again. Not that it's difficult, but I'm turned off by songwriting at this point in my life.

And there you have it ~ the story behind the song behind the story (or something).