Singing For Our Supper

Something we enjoy here in the writing cave is looking for recurring patterns in what we write. There’s some stuff that we do on purpose to give our story worlds and plots a consistent flavor, and then there’s stuff we’ve noticed recurring in subtle ways even though we never had a meeting and decided it should be in there. We’re fascinated by this, because our stories are all very different yet contain these common threads.

Among the recurring elements in our work is original song lyrics. Not every book has them, but they’re not limited to just the Music Series. The trend began with our very first novel, Miss Brandymoon’s Device.

Writing lyrics is very different from writing prose. It can take as long to come up with a few stanzas as it does to write a couple of pages, for us at least. But it’s fun to shift gears, and it’s good exercise. Both of us have taken our turns as songsmith with great results. What we hadn’t done until this week? Collaborate directly on lyrics.

Crazy, right? We’ve been at this for nine books now, lots of which contain song lyrics, and our whole deal is collaboration. Yet all those lyrics had been written by Jen or by Kent. The new ones were the first time we teamed up to craft the words to a song.

What was different about this case was that we had more constraints to deal with. The words had to come from a certain album, and we’d already nailed down its themes and mood in considerable detail. These lyrics also had to catalyze some specific actions, almost instructing the characters to do a certain thing. Note, this perceived instruction is not at all the meaning intended by the singer. Jen tackled this job, but the phrases she found that fit the desired meanings all felt trite to her. So, over dinner out, she and Kent analyzed the situation, brainstormed imagery, and jotted down a few snippets. And when we got home, Jen cranked out exactly the lyrics we needed.

A writing partner is someone you can still find new ways to collaborate with.