Guest Post: Evolution of A DJ by Ellen Harger

Guest post by Ellen Harger. Her self-published, debut novel, "Strong Enough" was released February 25, 2013. Her blog is My Mother Stuttered where the synopsis can be found.

She is thrilled to write her first guest blog post on Music Plus Books.

If you've taken a writing course, you'll likely cower in fear whenever someone suggests using copyrighted music in a novel. You've been conditioned with electrical shock critiques. BAD! zzzzttt! BAD! ZZZZZzzzttttT! Fried writer with chicken, coming right up!

If you're a reader who has thought, "I've never heard of that song," and stopped reading only to lose an hour on the internet, you've experienced why music is discouraged in novels. Even more likely, you rolled your eyes and thought, "Pretentious twit. I have no idea what you're talking about. And I'm not impressed." Author 0, Instructor 1.

But why are some authors tempted to combine real music with novels? Why not make up lyrics? Yeah, and I'll just pick up a guitar and be Eddie Van Halen, too. I blame movie soundtracks. Off the record, I'm a huge fan of movie soundtracks. So despite suffering from shock treatment via class critques, I wanted to include all the lyrics that ever moved me.

Whitney, the main character of my novel "Strong Enough," became a DJ to justify my use of musicians' words. But when I read a book with a similar technique and skipped all of the lyrics, it crystalized. If I wasn't going to work that hard to figure out what the author was trying to suggest, why should I ask others to do the same? Lightbulb--lyrics are cumbersome tricks that break a reader's enjoyment and a crutch for the uncertain author.

We experience music and novels differently. Describing the sound of a song for a reader is tricky so lyrics remained critical to me--they just couldn't be quoted. I had to do the work and  replace them with character comments or the weaving of particular phrases into narration. Whitney's musical selections had to tell stories that were plausible to both the fictitious and real audience.

On a personal whim, I decided to purchase music that had Superman as, or in, the title. It was a surprisingly large list. I opened up my search to include lyrics and very first radio show was born. Whitney's first show of the novel, Black Box Songs, was designed as a training exercise for her while the MTSYWB show gave me the opportunity to mention Sheryl Crow's "Strong Enough" without being obvious.

My final touch was naming each chapter with a song title. A few chapters were already titled after songs that embodied their arc, so I decided to turn the chapter list into a playlist. There were four non-song chapter titles that I really liked so I made up artists and albums. It was as close as I got to writing my own lyrics. Just call me E. Vedder.

Writing is an art. When done well, the reader is unaware of the work. When done right (with careful intention), breaking the rules can be good. And when stubborn enough, an author will endure the electro-shock to write the story she imagined.

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