Quantcast
Channel: music – Nail Your Novel
Browsing all 73 articles
Browse latest View live

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

‘Each song helped me see the main character a little more clearly’– The...

My guest this week has always written in the grip of a wide-ranging playlist, but for one particular novel she found herself listening to three pieces intensively, maybe obsessively. In those songs she...

View Article



Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

‘I hear these songs and see the flawless story I wanted to write’ – The...

One of my earliest Undercover Soundtrack guests returns this week with a brand-new novel – and another beguiling musical journey. The story features a character whose life spans two timelines, which...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

‘I let the song dictate what I left unsaid’– The Undercover Soundtrack, Reb...

My guest this week was an award-winning horror genre writer, but turned indie to try to write the sort of novel he loved to read. For several years he published nothing while he struggled with his new...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

‘The visceral feeling when a piece of music strikes me right’– The Undercover...

My guest this week says he’s often wished his readers could hear the soundtrack he has in mind while he’s writing. For his urban fantasy Locked Within, that was a stack of movie scores, but also some...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

‘Very French; and weighed down by heat and melancholy’ – The Undercover...

I’ve now got Eric Satie’s Gnossiennes on repeat in my head – and so will you once you’ve read this week’s Undercover Soundtrack. Satie helped my guest conjure a lulling, heady summer in France; a...

View Article


Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

‘Friendship, betrayal and making sense of the past’– The Undercover...

You may recognise the name of my guest this week. She was one of my earliest Soundtrackers and she returns this week with a novel of friendship and betrayal: a man looking back on his youth and making...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

‘The music gave me short sentences, like gunshots’– The Undercover...

My guest this week tackles a range of narrative styles – comedy, action sci-fi and romcom. He uses music to tap into the right mood for a character or to find the right rhythm for the prose. He also...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

‘This is my blues novel’– The Undercover Soundtrack, Nathan Singer

My guest this week is another of those enviably talented writers who is as happy playing a set of strings as a qwerty keyboard. Not only that, he is a playwright and an experimental performing artiste....

View Article


Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

‘Love is the key to these stories’– The Undercover Soundtrack, Andy Harrod

I heard a quote this week that I love: ‘All art aspires to the condition of music’. Meaning, it works beyond its medium; a direct connection with nerves and heart. This quote seems particularly to fit...

View Article


Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

‘A piece of music with dark water running through it’– The Undercover...

Sometimes I find there’s an inexplicable moment when the tune in my ears tells the story back to me and from then on is part of its world. My guest this week became wedded to a Ravel piano concerto...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

‘I woke from a wondrous and startling dream’– The Undercover Soundtrack, Mark...

I’ve often thought we need to be able to film our dreams. While we’re at it, can we please record the fully orchestrated music we compose in them? While I’ve slumbered, I’ve written albums that...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

‘Belle & Sebastian are truly a band made for writers’– Scott D Southard, The...

My guest this week says his wife has forbidden him to air certain overplayed albums in her presence. Of course, they are the ones that provided the souls of his novels; drew him to the writing desk;...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

‘Melancholy, softly-haunted halls’– The Undercover Soundtrack, Leah Bobet

Before she was a writer, my guest this week was a musician. Proficient on piano, guitar and French horn, her most cherished instrument was her own; she yearned to be an opera singer. That didn’t work...

View Article


Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

‘To draw a curtain around a mental space’– The Undercover Soundtrack, Bryan...

My guest this week measures his novels in rainstorms. More accurately, I should say he measures them in how many times he has listened to one rainstorm during the writing. His novel is about a dreamy...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

‘A sense of trying to work something out’– The Undercover Soundtrack, Joanne...

It’s Morrissey all the way for my guest this week. The contrast of dark lyrics and lifting melody became the sense of threat that runs through her novel. The force of his ‘take-me-or-leave-me’...

View Article


Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

‘Searching for truth’– The Undercover Soundtrack, TJ Cooke

My guest this week says he uses music before he sets hands to keyboard, to help conjure the creative mood. Sometimes it works the other way around; he’ll be writing and will realise the mind-jukebox is...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

‘Grime meets classical’– The Undercover Soundtrack, Polly Courtney

My guest this week grew up on classical music. Childhood piano lessons inspired her latest novel, Feral Youth, about the relationship between a troubled teenager and a piano teacher. One pivotal scene...

View Article


Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

‘Music to unite and reunite’– The Undercover Soundtrack, Denise Kahn

I first discovered this week’s guest when a Google fairy revealed she’d written a novel about reincarnation and music. I had to try to recruit her. She turned out to be even more suitable for the...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

‘Music to reshape the world’– The Undercover Soundtrack, William Alexander

My guest this week sets his novels in a place that is playful and unsettling – a dark, broken place full of clang and clamour. Most suitable for this spooky time of year. He credits this atmosphere to...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

‘Sex, drugs, metaphysics and rock’n’roll’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, David...

Music, dead rock gods, psychedelia consciousnesses and the CIA – this novel definitely had to feature on the Undercover Soundtrack. Its title came from a Jimi Hendrix song, and germinated when the...

View Article
Browsing all 73 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images