Patrick-Leigh
Inkling
So, today, I have an interesting idea for a writing experiment I'm going to try and I thought I might share my idea with the rest of you to see what you thought of it and if you would be interested in trying it. My idea is to use orchestral music (though other kinds might also work) to figure out the tonal beats of a story. By this I mean you let the different sections of a piece of music help you figure out if a happy beat is followed by a somber beat or a foreboding beat or a comical one. That doesn't mean you delve too deep into the specifics of what happens in the story, mind you. You're just letting the music guide you on if things get better or worse for your characters, if they succeed or fail, and if some new element comes into the story, like a new theme being used in a symphony.
Keep in mind, I'm not saying that you use an entire piece to figure out the tone of an entire chapter of your story. This isn't a 1:1 ratio, where 10% of a ballet equals 10% of your story. You can use an entire piece to work out the beats of a single scene or a few bars of the music determine the tone and mood of one or more chapters. What I am proposing is not some exact formula with strict rules. It is merely a tool that you can use to help get yourself started and to help you find inspiration. If, as your work progresses, you find the original arrangement of story beats doesn't work, then you simply change them as much as is necessary.
I'm sure that me describing this may not be enough to convey how this approach would work, so I think I'm going to use the music that put this idea in my head and describe the beats that the notes inspired me to use. That music would be Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. We'll only be going through the 1st part of the ballet, Adoration of the Earth, which is divided into several sections, Introduction, Augurs of Spring, Ritual Abduction, Spring Rounds, Ritual of the Rival Tribes, Procession of the Sage, The Sage, and Dance of the Earth. I'll hyperlink to specific timestamps of YouTube videos, telling you how a particular section of the music will inspire the basic tone of a beat in the story.
You'll notice right away that I'm not actually being too precise in what is happening. It may be something as simple as "Things get worse," or "A brief period of calm giving characters and audience a chance to breath." That being said, I can tell you the basic gist of the story that I'm planning. It involves my Half-Orc protagonist, Perdita Nightshade, as she makes a journey across the Transitory Plane of Fire.
Her motivation is simple enough: Travel from Planet A in Galaxy A to Planet B in Galaxy B by taking a "shortcut" through the Plane of Fire. Thus, she will use a Fire Portal on Planet A to enter the Plane of Fire, make her trek across the Plane until she reaches another Fire Portal, and, passing through it, arrive on Planet B, bypassing all the lightyears of distance between the Planets in the process. The distance between the two Fire Portals on the Plane of Fire is by no means short, from the perspective of a 6'6" humanoid, but it is a distance Perdita can manage using more than one means of transportation. It may take her a few days, a few weeks, or a whole month (at the longest,) but it's better than the alternatives.
What sort of things Perdita will do and encounter along the way I cannot say just yet. I am only using Adoration of the Earth from The Rite of Spring to help me get the tones of the beats of the first stretch of the journey, nothing more. Oh, but before we begin, the hyperlinks will only take you to the start of the sequence. The video won't stop at the points I list, so you'll have to do that manually. Sorry if that's inconvenient for you. Also, because the hyperlink address itself counts toward the character limit on these posts, I'll have to break this into chunks, despite the text itself clearly not adding up to 10,000 characters. Sorry about that, too.
Keep in mind, I'm not saying that you use an entire piece to figure out the tone of an entire chapter of your story. This isn't a 1:1 ratio, where 10% of a ballet equals 10% of your story. You can use an entire piece to work out the beats of a single scene or a few bars of the music determine the tone and mood of one or more chapters. What I am proposing is not some exact formula with strict rules. It is merely a tool that you can use to help get yourself started and to help you find inspiration. If, as your work progresses, you find the original arrangement of story beats doesn't work, then you simply change them as much as is necessary.
I'm sure that me describing this may not be enough to convey how this approach would work, so I think I'm going to use the music that put this idea in my head and describe the beats that the notes inspired me to use. That music would be Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. We'll only be going through the 1st part of the ballet, Adoration of the Earth, which is divided into several sections, Introduction, Augurs of Spring, Ritual Abduction, Spring Rounds, Ritual of the Rival Tribes, Procession of the Sage, The Sage, and Dance of the Earth. I'll hyperlink to specific timestamps of YouTube videos, telling you how a particular section of the music will inspire the basic tone of a beat in the story.
You'll notice right away that I'm not actually being too precise in what is happening. It may be something as simple as "Things get worse," or "A brief period of calm giving characters and audience a chance to breath." That being said, I can tell you the basic gist of the story that I'm planning. It involves my Half-Orc protagonist, Perdita Nightshade, as she makes a journey across the Transitory Plane of Fire.
Her motivation is simple enough: Travel from Planet A in Galaxy A to Planet B in Galaxy B by taking a "shortcut" through the Plane of Fire. Thus, she will use a Fire Portal on Planet A to enter the Plane of Fire, make her trek across the Plane until she reaches another Fire Portal, and, passing through it, arrive on Planet B, bypassing all the lightyears of distance between the Planets in the process. The distance between the two Fire Portals on the Plane of Fire is by no means short, from the perspective of a 6'6" humanoid, but it is a distance Perdita can manage using more than one means of transportation. It may take her a few days, a few weeks, or a whole month (at the longest,) but it's better than the alternatives.
What sort of things Perdita will do and encounter along the way I cannot say just yet. I am only using Adoration of the Earth from The Rite of Spring to help me get the tones of the beats of the first stretch of the journey, nothing more. Oh, but before we begin, the hyperlinks will only take you to the start of the sequence. The video won't stop at the points I list, so you'll have to do that manually. Sorry if that's inconvenient for you. Also, because the hyperlink address itself counts toward the character limit on these posts, I'll have to break this into chunks, despite the text itself clearly not adding up to 10,000 characters. Sorry about that, too.