We listen to music constantly when we write, to the consternation of our officemates, who have to deal with the eighties rock at 11:30 at night. We also build a lot of of playlists for our stories. Some of those playlists are, as it were, soundtracks for the stories. Sometimes they’re comprised of the music our characters are listening to while they’re stuck in the car. Sometimes they have absolutely nothing to do, musically or thematically, with what we’re writing — it’s just the songs or the artists we were obsessed with while we were writing a particular story.
We didn’t come up with the playlist for Doves: Playlist until we’d finished the story and were doing publisher edits on it. For the actual writing of the story, we mostly listened to the playlist for Starling : here and here But while we were editing, we wanted a playlist that functioned as a soundtrack for the story.
What we finally came up with was jangly and angry and has a lot of glam rock on it, which tied we felt to themes of anger, fame, and isolation in the book.
erincmcrae
Racheline Maltese
Avian30 