Music for the Road

I've been thinking of all kind of interesting ways to divide a story. Chapters, sure, but that's so… ordinary. One thing I wanted to do with The Long Road is to group the chapters into sections named after road feature. Like "dead end" or "hairpin turn." I don't know if that's going to work, but it's a thought.

Another thought I had was to break up it up by the song that's playing at that moment of their road trip. But that would make for very short sections and is probably not a very good idea.

I have been thinking about road trip music, though. Each of the characters is going to have their own musical taste, just like real people. And sure, there's bound to be some overlap, with some bands or genres that everyone likes. But then maybe one person really likes Nine Inch Nails and no one else really gets what the big deal is. So then you have fighting over control of the radio.

In a perfect world, I would figure out exactly what each character would have on their chosen portable music player. I'd make playlists that I could listen to while writing, switching between them, depending on who has control of the radio at that point. That would be fun. But it's also a shit ton of work. And it has a downside. See, I'm not going to listen to music I don't like. Which means if I'm creating playlists of their preferences, they also need to fall within my preferences. And that's no good, is it? Won't I have to expand beyond that in order to make convincing characters? There are entire genres of music that I just don't care about. Like rap, or EDM, or whatever this over processed electronic pop crap is nowadays. I really don't want to listen to that.

So if I'm not going to hate my life while I'm writing, I basically need to carve up my musical tastes into three pieces, with some overlap here and there. Like a big ol' venn diagram. The problem is, who listens to what? I think I need three extremes, like, I don't know, country, punk, and metal. And then there are grey areas in between. Each person can deal with the grey area stuff, but is not a fan of the other extremes.

Or maybe I could just say, "And then they argued about music" and be done with it. But that's boring.

I don't know. There's still a lot I need to figure out. Like, you know, the plot.

I'll see you Wednesday.