Today Eve Marie Mont, author of A Breath of Eyre, has agreed to share how music has effected her writing.
“I write because I cannot NOT write.”
~ Charlotte Brontë
As a child, Eve was a tomboy/animal lover/aspiring actress who staged lip-synched productions of her favorite musicals since she couldn’t sing. Her love for athletics and animals remained, but the acting bug was soon replaced by the writing bug. In fourth grade, she wrote her first chapter book entitled, The Only Tomboy in My Class, and she was hooked.
Now Eve teaches high school English and Creative Writing in the Philadelphia suburbs and sponsors her school’s literary magazine. When not grading papers or writing, Eve can be found watching the Phillies with her husband, playing with her shelter pup, or daydreaming about her next story.
Music & A Breath
of Eyre
To get myself in the mood to write this post, I am listening
to the playlist for A Breath of Eyre
right now on Grooveshark. When Kare asked
me to write about how music plays a part in my writing, I was super excited!
While I can write a blog post while listening to music, unfortunately, I’m one
of those people who can’t write fiction in the same way; I find the lyrics too
distracting. BUT… that’s not to say music isn’t vitally important to my
process. In fact, for most of the important scenes of A Breath of Eyre, I chose a mood-setting song, the song I imagined
would be playing if the scene were made into a movie.
Some of the songs have the perfect rhythm or emotional
resonance for a scene; others have lyrics that seem oh-so-appropriate. Either
way, I listen to the song first so it’s echoing through my head, and then as
I’m writing, the scene will often take on qualities of the song. It’s kind of a
cool phenomenon, this synergy between art forms. For A Breath of Eyre, the bands that were most influential were
Coldplay, Thirteen Senses, Barcelona, and Embrace. But there are other amazing bands
and songs that became inextricably linked with my characters and their
journeys. These characters are teenagers after all, and music plays an
important role in almost every teen’s life. And music, I find, reveals a lot
about character.
For example, the first time Emma and her roommate, Michelle,
meet the adorable Owen, they sit around talking about their music tastes. Emma,
who is introspective and bookish, loves British bands like Coldplay and Snow
Patrol. Michelle, who’s more outspoken but has her secrets, claims to love
classic rock to impress Owen, but really prefers hip-hop and pop. And Owen, a
hippie at heart, loves folk and guitar-driven rock. Later on, Emma and Gray
swap favorite bands and songs as well. In fact, Gray and Emma’s dynamic drives
much of the conflict in the novel, so several of the songs chart the rocky trajectory
of their relationship, like “Trouble Sleeping,” “Gone,” and “Fix You.”
A few songs in my playlist capture the mysterious and
supernatural circumstances Emma find herself in when she gets transported into Jane Eyre: Thirteen Senses’ “Into the
Fire” and Coldplay’s “Postcards from Far Away” come to mind. And sometimes I’ll
even write a song into the novel if it’s significant enough, like Embrace’s
“Gravity,” the song Emma and Gray dance to at the Snow Ball. In my mind, “Gravity”
became the unofficial love theme of the book.
You can also take a quiz there to discover your literary
soul mate! Thanks so much, Kare, for such a fun guest post assignment, and
happy listening!
Thanks for stopping by Eve!
Books by Eve Marie Mont:
Description: Emma Townsend has always believed in stories—the ones she reads voraciously, and the ones she creates in her head. Perhaps it’s because she feels like an outsider at her exclusive prep school, or because her stepmother doesn’t come close to filling the void left by her mother’s death. And her only romantic prospect—apart from a crush on her English teacher—is Gray Newman, a long-time friend who just adds to Emma’s confusion. But escape soon arrives in an old leather-bound copy of Jane Eyre…
Reading of Jane’s isolation sparks a deep sense of kinship. Then fate takes things a leap further when a lightning storm catapults Emma right into Jane’s body and her nineteenth-century world. As governess at Thornfield, Emma has a sense of belonging she’s never known—and an attraction to the brooding Mr. Rochester. Now, moving between her two realities and uncovering secrets in both, Emma must decide whether her destiny lies in the pages of Jane’s story, or in the unwritten chapters of her own…
You can find her and any information about her books at any of these places:
just sayin,
-Kare
