My fantasy adventure (with a big dash of romance) began as a short story for a high school writing competition. The way I got started writing was by looping a specific song, letting it play over and over as I dreamed up a story with two specific elements: Two siblings, a boy and a girl, and a dragon. This very, very simple concept, along with the emotions and style of the song I was listening to, fueled my story which eventually became my fantasy trilogy, all from one song and one short story. Inside the short story, I decided to reference how it was created by having the first line reference a song that the boy was whistling.

From there on out, I incorporated songs that I made up, imagining lyrics and tunes from my fantasy world that my characters would know by heart. 

Alas, I am not a music major, so none of the songs have fixed melodies, just a sort of idea in my head what each song would sound like if it were real. 

But so far, both books have a few scenes with songs as characters sing to each other. Some songs are deeply important to the magic and the overall story of the book and the trilogy as a whole. 

The idea behind songs and story is that many songs are stories, or the way that some cultures liked to tell their stories instead of writing them down or just talking about the stories around a fire. A big theme, aspect of the Strange Trilogy’s style is how storytelling works, the power of words, and how story moments tie people together. Hazel, my main character’s role, is as the Dragontongue, a woman gifted with unusually powerful speech. Even when she strays from that destiny, her other job she is drawn to is taletelling, or a traveling storyteller. Stories and songs around the fire unite people and memorialize the events of the book, including quite a few losses–as well as a few victories!

I hope that if the trilogy gets published, my readers will not ignore the songs. (After all, I tried not to make them pages and pages long!) To ignore the impact of songs in these stories would be to miss the importance of storytelling and art in our culture. 

(At least, demonstrating art’s importance was part of my goal in writing the books. 🙂 

TLDR: songs are good. stories good. mmm.

 

–Natalie Zwolanek