Bethany Hagen's Blog

I saw a post about writing music on Veronica Roth’s blog and felt inspired to share some of my Landry Park writing tunes.  I’m a little eccentric about my writing music — number one, I have to have it to work, and number two, I vacillate between being ultra picky about my playlist and being completely cavalier (some days, I turn on the Beck or the Tori Amos station on Pandora and just get to work.)

But for the most part, I am not that casual about it.  I tailor playlists for certain moods, for certain scenes, for certain emotions that are currently playing out in my characters.   Like Veronica’s list, this music isn’t all from 2011, especially since I’ve been working on this novel in its many incarnations since 2008.  Some of it is old.  Some of it is very old (said in Legolas voice.)

My favorite songs for atmosphere and mood:

Even though Landry Park is set 200 years in the future and the crux of the plot centers around nuclear technology, the feel of the novel is somewhere between Gone with the Wind and Mansfield Park.  So for dinner scenes or ballroom scenes or for wandering in the garden fog scenes, I’ve got violins and pianos from Pride and Prejudice:

A Postcard to Henry Purcell — Jean Ives Thibaudet.

Meryton Townhall — Jean Ives Thibaudet

Some other brilliant atmosphere songs:

Evey Reborn — Dario Marianelli.  This one has been with me since the very, very beginning, when Landry Park was a very, very different novel.

Intro — The xx.

Here Comes a Chopper (to Chop Your Head Off) — Strangeletter.  Can you get any cuter than that lead singer?  Yowza.

 Half a Man — Methodic Doubt.

Hayling –FC Kahuna.  Love.

Primavera — Ludovico Einaudi.  I found this on Veronica Roth’s blog, and have been OBSESSED ever since.  It might be the most beautiful instrumental song ever.

Character songs:

What Goes Around…Comes Around — Justin Timberlake.  This is one of my favorite videos ever.  Opulence and carelessness and revenge…and beautiful people being angsty.  I could probably watch Justin Timberlake and Scarlett Johannsen make pancakes and still be invested in it.

Love Hurts — Incubus.

Heavy in Your Arms — Florence and the Machine.  Actually, any song by Florence.  FATM is pretty much the soundtrack for my protagonist.  (By the way, have you heard her cover of Drake’s Take Care?)

Born to Die — Lana Del Rey.  Another singer I listen to constantly while writing. (Video Games is crazy good too.)

The Royal We — Silversun Pickups

Panic Switch — Silversun Pickups

The Words That Maketh Murder — PJ Harvey

I Am Stretched Out on Your Grave — Kate Rusby

Power — Kanye West

In Vain — loveliesbleeding.  Probably my favorite song of all time.  All time.

Leicester — loveliesbleeding.  This one’s cheating a bit, because I wrote the lyrics, but loveliesbleeding turns words into something else.

So there’s your music fix for the week.  There’s a lot of other songs I listen to while writing, but these are the ones I specifically seek out for re-inspiration.  And for anyone who’s interested in a revision update, I think I’m probably a few good days away from sending it to my critique partners. (!)

Now that I have a clearer sense of where I’m going with my revision of Landry Park, I’m ready to get cracking.  I’m not sure how much of the novel will ultimately be rewritten, but I’m guessing the answer is somewhere between some of the novel and most of the novel, and it’s probably going to take a lot of hard work and time.

So why not toil shoulder to shoulder with the NaNo folk?  Draw inspiration from the community?  Remind myself that once I finish Landry Park (ha!), I can start on a new shiny project like the real NaNo-ers do?

My WrAHM Society friend, Melissa Hurst suggests NaNoFinMo for those of us who are in the middle of novels (or revising them,) and I think it’s a fantastic idea.

It will be difficult to carve out time to write every day, but I’ll make it happen.  After all, I’m hoping to get and agent and get published, and write many more books — perhaps one day, every month will be like NaNoWriMo.  Not necessarily in it’s difficulty or intensity, but in that I have the resources to focus on my writing every day of the week, consistently and for long spaces of time.

There are no crushed Cheerios in the carpet in this fantasy either.

So I got to talk to a Real Literary Agent last week.  She was awesome and helpful and kind, and offered me her time that day and in the future to talk about revisions for my book.  Before Thursday, I thought R&R stood for Rest and Relaxation, but now I know better.

It means Revise and Resubmit.

As I watch my agented/published friends in The WrAHM Society, and as I mull over the Agent’s suggestions, I am beginning to appreciate the difficult nature of the publishing business.  Good news comes bundled with disappointing news.  Praise comes bundled with criticism.  Almost-but-not-quites, and you’re-not-done-yets are as common as coughs in a proctologist’s office.  I’d like to think this is true of similar professions: visual artists, musicians, and even small business owners.  It’s the price of not being a drone at some Evil Corporate Office or Faceless County Entity, although, truth be told, I miss Faceless County Entity (the Library Version) quite a bit.  It was safe, and comforting, and I could do things like drink water out of a Ziploc bag in front of my boss and not get fired.

Getting an MLS and glaring at patrons from behind a desk is my career back-up plan, but Faceless County Entities have nothing on writing.  I like wandering around like a space case, trying to imagine the perfect level of drizzle for the background of a tea-drinking scene.  I like watching hundreds and thousands of words trickle out from my fingertips in libraries, cafes and on my couch.  And I like the freedom of knowing that once I am finished with a book — whether it be trunked or published — I’m free to seek out fresh stories and new voices and different types of drizzle.  At the library, the only fresh things are the potatoes accidently dropped into the book drop.  (Yes, that happened.)

Back to my R&R.  The Agent’s perceptions were incredibly insightful and diagnostic, and while she was giving her editorial notes, I could start seeing the new book, a better book, taking shape out there in the ether.  This revision would be substantial and more like a rewrite, but in the end, I think it will be a much better novel.  My main characters will stay, the setting will stay, the angry and restless Rootless will stay, but the things they are doing will be different.  There will be more exploration of the world.  There may be some more character-level intrigue a la Downton Abbey, and less twists and turns a la Ringer (which I love, btw.)  It will take a while.  Months.  Many months, even.  But I feel like Landry Park is worth it.  And hopefully so does the Agent, otherwise she wouldn’t have called and offered to be a resource for working through ideas.

Here’s to hoping that the tortoise wins the race, and that my local coffee shop is well-stocked with brew.

ps. Link soup

http://kathybradey.blogspot.com/2011/06/so-its-revise-and-resubmit.html

http://www.yahighway.com/2010/07/how-to-revise-and-resubmit.html

http://www.butterslastmeal.com/2011/06/revise-and-resubmit.html

http://www.kristinhalbrook.com/2010/07/on-revise-and-resubmits.html

Sunday, at church, my pastor talked about systems—marriages, families, schools, nations—and how it is impossible to untangle the individual from their respective systems.  He went on to relate this to church-y stuff and how we integrate ourselves into a narrative of love post 9/11, but his initial definition of systems and plausibility structures left me wondering what narratives am I in?  How did 9/11 shape my plausibility structures?

I was 14, just starting ninth grade at new school in a new city in a new state.  I’d moved from a fairly poor Catholic school in south Kansas City, Missouri across state lines to a public school in the much better-off Johnson County, Kansas.  I was going to school with kids better-dressed and better-looking and better-everything than me.  I lived in a trailer park and had read Jane Eyre five times.  My worldview had been shaped by simultaneously by the prosperous Clinton Presidency and living in a part of town where people were hamstrung at the shopping mall.

Then 9/11 happened, and it was a giant stone thrown into a giant pool with giant ripples.  Everything changed.  At 14, my new world demanded I think about foreign policy and inter-religious interactions and the ramifications of cultural imperialism, which are all things few ninth-graders are equipped to handle with so little preparation.  My new world demanded that I adopt a me vs. other, us vs. them perspective.  And so I did for a while, until I got older and found that perspective didn’t seem right any more.

But even with all the maturing and trying to stretch myself into a softer, there is no them there is only us narrative, I can’t deny that coming of age post 9/11 has impacted my creative work.  My novel begins with the United States crumbling, debt-ridden and weak, to an Eastern power, and with a civil war between the wealthy and the poor.  It begins with people filled with righteous anger making war and it ends with people with righteous anger making war.  It has two main characters who struggle to balance a life of privilege with doing the right thing, and another main character that uses tragedy to feed his ambition.

Would the novel have these things if 9/11 had been like every other day?  If No Child Left Behind and reality television were the most controversial things to happen in the Aughts?  Would this novel even exist?

After three years, two major revisions (which each time involved deleting about 40,000 words,) and a more normalized revision with fleshing out characterization, world building and narrative threads, Landry Park is now in the hands of my critique partners.  While I’m waiting for their disgust suggestions, I am working on other things.

At first I thought I would just flesh out notes on some ideas that have been swirling around in my brain for quite a while.  Three years is a long time to work on one project (although much of that was taken up with school, and gestating and birthing two babies) and even though I am religiously monomaniacal about finishing a project I’ve started, my brain tends to wander after that much time.  Plus, as a mom, I have a lot of dead time in the car, or while the kids smash Play-Doh into the walls, or while I’m waiting for my son to finish on the potty.

That’s right.  When you have a toddler, hours of your life will be dedicated to watching someone poop. Waiting for them to poop.  Begging them to poop so you can go check on dinner or the infant that’s started pulling laundry out of the hamper.

But, when I started fleshing out notes, the stories started getting more compelling.  The characters became more vivid.  And I could resist opening a new Scrivener file and starting.  And after gut-wrenching revisions, filled with massive cuts and hours of fine-tuning and fiddling, the feeling of a blank screen and infinite possibility was amazing.

In drafting land, there are no mistakes.  There are few agonies and even fewer minor frustrations.  You are walking along with your main character, learning as they learning, meeting new people as they meet them.  I love this part, just spending time with your protagonist, because on the long road ahead, you need these happy memories to keep going.  It’s a lot like marriage, really.  Or watching a tiny person poop.