Patti O'Shea's Blog

I’ve talked before about how I’ve acquired words that my characters like to use. It’s not that I didn’t sometimes use these words myself, but they weren’t my first choice. Now they often are. It’s still odd at times to realize I say dude because of Cass or crap because of Cai, but I’ve largely learned to accept this.

Weirder still is that I pick up my characters’ tastes in music. At least when they make a preference known to me.

This one I’m not quite used to yet. I only started paying attention recently, so it’s possible that this has happened before without my realizing it. There were times I just had to have music playing when I was writing, but I didn’t think about what I was listening to or why.

But then the Tchaikovsky day happened and it was a whoa! moment for me.

I own some classical music, but it’s not a genre I listen to all that often, and while I can recognize the more famous songs that were used in movies or TV commercials, I’m not all that well versed in it. Then I started writing Blood Feud and Isobel had Tchaikovsky playing in her car.

It was the following weekend while I was working on another story that I felt compelled to listen to Tchaikovsky myself. I checked iTunes, but I didn’t own any. I tried other classical music, thinking it was just a yen for that genre, but no. I wanted Tchaikovsky. It had to be Tchaikovsky. Finally, I surrendered and bought three different albums filled with his music.

I played them over and over. On Sunday, I did some more writing on Blood Feud and saw the Tchaikovsky reference. And the light bulb lit up. Isobel. I was listening to this composer because of Isobel.

Months after she left, I tried Tchaikovsky again when the urge to listen to classical re-emerged. And I had no interest. I ended up switching to a different composer instead.

The other character that I’m aware of influencing my music is Kel from In the Darkest Night. He liked Seether. Now I like Seether. I still play Seether. I’ve had their music stuck in my head the last couple of weeks. Kel’s not around anymore, and hasn’t been for a while, so I’m thinking this music is going to stick.

And I’m wondering if this is going to happen again with some other character and what music I’ll be playing then.

Tags: characters, music, writing

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 31st, 2011 at 15:00 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.