Theme Songs
Posted on Sunday, January 23rd, 2011It’s only been a few days since I last blogged, but I figured another one certainly couldn’t hurt. Especially since it’s been a pretty good week for me and my writing. I haven’t moved ahead in my novel yet (I’m really good at procrastinating) but I know where I need to go in it. What I have been doing is writing a lot this week on my D&D characters. While most of this writing won’t ever see a publishing world, it is very relaxing for me to try and write about characters that I’m intimately involved in.
That’s actually what today’s topic is… not D&D and how it influences my writing though. That topic has been gone over to death. Instead I’ll talk about the newest thing that me and my fellow geeks are doing is actually a really good idea, both for the game and for writing in general. Theme Songs! I may be getting ahead of myself though. Let me start at the beginning and explain.
Years ago (a good three years ago, maybe four, if memory serves) I started running a D&D game for my husband and friends. It wasn’t the first game I’d run but I decided that I wanted to do something different than the usual type of game. What I decided to run instead was an evil game. We’re playing D&D like we normally would but instead of just having evil alignments or being jerk’s (though they are that as well, quite often), they had a semi-firm goal. Go from being nobody’s at third level to running an evil empire before level 20. Rather early in this game one of my players was pleased enough that he was thinking about it all the time. He was listening to music and suddenly realized that the game as a whole has a “theme song”. The whole group agreed and Nightwish’s “I Wish I Had an Angel” got the passing grade. Although the whole song applies to the game, for me it’s the line “Burning Angel Wings to Dust” that really makes the song match the game for me.
Recently the evil fighter in the group realized he was “Indestructable” (Note: It has a really 45 second beginning before the song starts) and claimed that as his individual characters theme song. It’s now at the point where all of the PC’s (player characters) and most of the important NPC’s (non-player characters) have themes for themselves. We’re doing it for most of the games we play in at this point.
As with anything that takes up my time, I eventually start wondering exactly how I can use this in my writing. To be fair, this idea was easier to implement than you would think. I have started looking at my novel and characters in my story and have been trying to figure out what their songs are. I can see a few of you out there are looking at me as if I’m an idiot now. “How hard can it be to find a song that means something to your characters?” Quite a bit harder than you’d expect actually.
First you need to know about the character, their motivations, how they view the world and why they view it the way they do. Then you need to find a style of music that matches the character. Having a folk song done to acoustic guitar for a tattooed insane woman, like ”Jack” off of Mass Effect 2, just wouldn’t feel like it matched the character. After music type, you need to pay attention to the lyrics. Simply because a character is a pyro-maniac does not mean that the song that applies to that character will be about burning something. In fact, I usually find it more true if it doesn’t. Third, you have to be willing to accept that sometimes it will be the song that you least expected it to be.
As an example, I am playing a Cat-Folk battle dancer in one of my games. She is pretty much a caffeine kitty… She only sleeps two hours a day, and she is always either on the move running around or she is completely at rest and almost cat-napping. She is a happy, pleasant woman, who speaks with a slight accent. She always looks for the best in a situation. I originally thought that her song would show off her nearly inexhaustible energy and pleasure, but in doing so, I forgot about her past. I forgot to ask why she forced herself to look for the bright side. Unsurprisingly, while I was ignoring this, I couldn’t find a song for her.
The perfect song came about when I was listening to an artist that I normally don’t listen to. Avril Lavigne’s Innocence (shown below) encompassed not only my caffeine kitty’s predilection to ignoring unhappy things, but also took into account her tortured past as a sex slave (by the way, the answer is “Yes, my characters never have happy histories.”). The song is below and suits her to a ‘T’.
So, now I’m doing this and every song I listen to has the potential to be a song for a character in my book. “Tear you Apart” by She Wants Revenge is now the theme song for Zack, Xiam’s boyfriend in my Vampire Fiction “Falling through the Threshold”. Listen to the song and tell me that doesn’t make him that much creepier as you read through “The White Citadel”. I dare ya.
So, do you have a theme song? Do you use theme songs for characters? Do you think that you’ll be using it in your own writing?
Tags: Blog, D & D, D&D, Dungeons & Dragons, I Wish I Had an Angel, Indestructible, Innocence, Mass Effect 2, motivation, Music, Nightwish, Tear you apart, Theme Songs, Writing
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