The Wish of Music or a Story is Born.

[Moejoe]

I thought this might be interesting to other writers and readers, it's my own personal journey through a recently completed story (as far as I can remember the events).

The Wish of Music

I'm often amazed at the way music affects me. The great majority of what I write is in direct reaction to a song I'm listening to. These songs spark images and emotions in my head, that then become stories. Sometimes these stories are fully formed and I'm nothing more than an interpreter of the song, other times I have the spark but not the tinder.

In the case of this story it was the conflagration of two events that brought the story to life. At the same time as I was listening to 'Kelly Watch the Stars' by the French band Air, I was looking at the sky through the window. For the first time in ages the orange-haze of street lamps was absent, and I could see the stars as clearly as if I was out in the countryside.

Soon enough an image popped into my head.

A young girl, knees up close to her chest, looking into a clear night sky.

And that image could only be of a girl longing for something. A deep want that as yet I didn't understand.

Flesh on the Bones.

A lot of the time I'll start immediately at this point and see what happens, letting the story unfold as I write, but in this case I couldn't figure out what she was longing for and the story wouldn't happen. All Kelly did was sit upon the roof of the house and stare at the stars. She was longing for something but she wouldn't tell me what that was. I call it finger-freeze, not so much a block, but a minor irritant. In cases such as this I'll take a nap and see what the story is about in that hazy half-awake state.

So I napped. While napping I saw Kelly asleep in a bedroom full of astronomy maps, pictures of the moon, and a mobile of rocket ships left over from her early childhood. I saw a silver streak in the sky. An explosion as bright as sunshine, and a girl waking from sleep to shield her eyes.

Then I saw her at the window, looking down upon a diamond of light embedded in the midnight blackness of a lawn. And then....

Writing

Fingers unfrozen I now knew who was longing, and it was a tandem longing, not just Kelly, but the strange whisper of a being that emerged from the diamond of light. A whisper that soon became a voice in her head. A homesick voice that wanted to return to the home from which it was lost. Add to this a young girl who never belonged on a planet she called home, and my story had taken on a life of its own.

I began with Kelly waking to a bright sunshine that didn't belong in the night. I followed her to the diamond of light, and then tagged along as something otherworldly and quite distressed whispered her into actions that she did not want to perform. And then, like a spy, I listened in on surprising thoughts that confused the midnight visitor. Thoughts of escape and a longing for worlds absent of vacuum and the problems of gravity.

They say all fiction is a merely the butting of heads, two desires in opposition. In this story the desire was shared, but only one could have their wish fulfilled. Only one would leave the earth behind.

Two hours later I knew what Kelly was longing for, and why she was sitting on the roof of that house looking at the stars. The story was complete. Ready to apple-pie-cool on the digital shelf. Later I'll go back and add ice cream to the dish

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PJ

EDIT: This is the song that gave me the initial idea, in case you're unfamiliar: