Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Writing to trailer music

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Every writer has their own method of writing (outlines, by the seat of their pants, even pants-less) and certain environments they need (complete solitude, busy cafe).

I discovered a while ago I need music when I write. Not just any music, but orchestral music. There must be no singing (or the words must be unintelligible), which makes the background music in most cafes deeply annoying. I started with New agey electronica like Enigma or Andreas Vollenweider, and then moved on to movie scores, which tend to be driving, rhythmic, and stirring. I have written tens of thousands of words to Pirates of the Caribbean. The Killing Fields makes me tear up every time. Mishima. The Mission. Steamboy. And oh my God, Last of the Mohicans — every time I’m listening to Last of the Mohicans and I feel myself getting incredibly emotional and stirred-up by the music, it’s “Massacre/Canoes.” Every. Time.

Then I discovered video game scores. I had no idea that modern video games had such good music: Assassin’s Creed (any of them),Uncharted (any of them), Infamous. Video game scores have a tricky mission in life: they have to be good music that you might hear over and over and over again while you try to solve a certain puzzle, so that you feel energized but won’t want to stab someone the thirty-second time you’ve heard the same clip.

This past November, I made the most stunning discovery of all: trailer music.

I had no idea this category existed.

You know that music in a trailer that immediately grips you and forces you to have an emotional reaction to thirty seconds of a movie you know nothing about? The sound that makes you turn to the person next to you and say, “What is that music?”?

It’s trailer music. It’s a whole genre of short, epic music that evokes a complete reaction. I’ve seen some commenters called it “Epic Score music” or even “Epica” (which is the name of one of the groups who does it). It’s completely involving without having a particular tag to it (which is what drove me nuts about Pirates of the Caribbean after a while — I kept thinking about that movie).

Here are the Epic Score artists I’ve found so far:

If there are others in this vein, please let me know. I love this stuff. Also, any other recommendations for music in this vein (or video game scores, or even movie scores, although those have been hit or miss after a bit). I’m only sorry that I can’t buy 40 albums at once.

 

Everybody has a different universe

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I was in the supermarket this afternoon, buying snacks for tonight’s Webelos meeting, when the woman behind me in line started talking to the cashier.

“Do you like mysteries?” she asked. “I just read a good one.”

I concentrated on getting my credit card information into the machine and checking that the machine hadn’t been fitted with a skimmer. When I finished signing my name, I looked back at the woman who was talking: she had her Kindle out and was glancing through her most recently read titles. I guess the cashier was an old friend.

“Have you read A Song of Fire and Ice?” the woman asked. “It takes place in olden times, you know, with knights and horses and spooky things. I think they made a movie out of it.”

It’s a moment like that when I remember we all live in different universes.

Holy moly, I thought, how could you not know that the book series is called A Song of Ice and Fire? That isn’t the name of any of the books at all. It doesn’t take place in “olden times,” it takes place in a fantasy kingdom that never existed. The author is George RR Martin and it wasn’t made into a movie, it was made into one of the biggest television events of last year, a series on HBO?

I haven’t read any of the books (Darin has; he gave up on book 3, as has every single person he’s talked to, so I don’t know who all has been buying Book 4, let alone Book 5, which apparently was the best-selling fiction book of all last year), but I know all of these things. I know Sean Bean starred in the HBO series, and the series kept in The Major Twist that everyone expected them to get rid of (since, you know, they had Sean Bean). I know George RR Martin has a really big beard. I know the series is partially inspired by the Wars of the Roses, but once you have actual dragons in your book, you’ve gone rather further afield than just your inspiration.

People don’t know stuff.

They don’t have to. They still enjoy the world. The world still spins.

Most people haven’t even heard of any of these books or TV series and they’re still pretty knowledgeable about stuff. My dental hygienist bored me to tears while I was in the chair the other day going on and on about the football playoffs, and yet these things she was telling me were extremely important to her view of the universe.

It’s cool when you understand enough about the world that you can explain it to someone else. It’s frustrating as hell when there are things I don’t understand and can’t seem to grok for the life of me, no matter how hard I try. Generally, if I’m interested enough in something, I like learning all about it, and then I tell other people about it.

Sometimes it stuns me when I run across someone who’s enthusiastic about something (as this woman clearly was about A Game of Thrones, which was the top book in her Kindle) and yet doesn’t know very much about it. I wonder sometimes how many times I talk about something called A Song of Fire and Ice and the person next to me rolls their eyes and goes about their business.

The universe’s testing service

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If there’s a psychological term for this phenomenon, I’d love to know what it is. Everyone knows what I’m talking about when I mention it, like it’s some great metaphysical truism. I can’t come up with the proper cliche for “When you want to do something, obstacles jump into your way to test your commitment” but I know there is one. It’s not quite When it rains, it pours, because that’s just about getting more of the same (usually bad). There’s a damn cliche for everything — help me out here, people.

This week I decided to get serious about large chunks of time for my writing. I have several projects I want to finish, I have new ones I want to start. I have a list, and I am honestly interested in doing everything on the list. It is not a crazy amount of work, although it demands dedication and performance and a lack of wasting time on the Internet. I am not aimless. I am very focused.

Of course suddenly there are several thousand non-writing things that must be handled. That’s not an exaggeration: yes, they must be done and generally I am the one to do them because I am the one with a day that is easy to arrange. Simon needed to see an eye doctor ASAP. I had to drop off some stuff for the school play (which meant going to the market, then swinging by school, getting everything in there…). More Webelos stuff got scheduled we hadn’t been expecting (or should have been expecting and simply didn’t). The First Lego League Championship had been scheduled for the 14th and got unexpectedly rescheduled, so the kids’ Lego teams had to reschedule meetings. And so on.

I asked on Twitter/Facebook, “This week I’m serious about making time for my writing. The universe responds with a million appts for me to take care. What’s that about?” And one of my cohorts from USC responded, “Confirmation of commitment..are you sure that’s what you want to do.” And that’s an explanation I’ve heard from a couple of people. Like it’s an event that everyone’s experienced and is probably reproducible in a lab: You’ve mentally committed to work on your own stuff…so the universe steps up with a series of tests to make sure that you really mean what you say. Not so much mental resistance as the physical, external, in-your-face kind.

Only…I can’t really envision the Universe saying, “Hmmm…yeah, that chick over there. Too many New Year’s resolutions. I don’t buy her commitment. Throw some obstacles in her way, okay?” And the Universe’s team of elves get cracking on the problem. Actually, now that I’ve phrased it that way I totally envision the Universe and some elves, but I’m not sure it helps me understand what’s going on here to personify it this way.

This has not stopped me from phrasing my response politely as, “I will of course do all of these tasks that absolutely need to be done, and then I will get back to what I was doing before, and you will give me more time, Universe, ‘kay? Thanks.”