Tuesday, September 24, 2013

My Writing Muse (Interestingly enough, not the band Muse!) :)

I recently saw on Twitter and Tumblr that Coldplay had written and released the theme song (titled “Atlas”) for the upcoming Catching Fire movie, and my first thought was WOW. Suzanne Collins has arrived. Yes, she’s a NYT bestselling author, yes, The Hunger Games broke box office records, and yes, she has an Oscar winning actress playing her protagonist.

But now that Coldplay has written her theme song? Please-oh-please, let me be her for a day!

You see, I’d like to marry Coldplay. The whole band. Throw in the piano and guitars too. They get me, (regardless of them not knowing I exist), and I get them.  Their song Paradise is essentially my current MS in song form, and oddly enough, I started writing that book (could show you the created on date for the doc.) before Paradise ever released. The first time I heard the song, I’m pretty sure I had a transcendental experience.

It took my husband and I five heartbreaking years to get pregnant with our first child—our adorable daughter—and when we were miraculously, joyously, pregnant with her, we went to a Coldplay concert at just six weeks into my pregnancy. The noise and bass at that concert were SO LOUD I was terrified that it might cause defects for my little in utero baby, but still, I could not leave! (And of course, concerts can’t cause birth defects.) During their song Yellow (also integral to a scene in my book), hundreds of big, bouncy, yellow balloons dropped from the rafters of the arena, and it was so beautiful--I’m pretty sure I cried—in the middle of a rock concert.

If I ever need inspiration or freedom from writer’s block, Coldplay is my go-to. Can I count them as having written my theme song, even if they don’t know they’ve done it? 

I’d love to hear about your writing muse!  Who or what are they?

1 comment:

  1. Gretchen, what a terrific post! - Though my own two "babies" are 27 and 26 respectively, I can nonetheless relate to how you felt at that concert because of how much I also love Coldplay. Somehow their music took on an entirely new dimension for me after my husband left me last year. Like so much other music, it was as if I had never fully heard them before, and that was never so true as for the song Yellow (I nearly cried reading your post, thinking of all those yellow balloons coming down - there was something ineffably sweet and sad at the same time about it).

    So, bittersweet or not, they remain my muse. Except that my muse is more complex, being an odd admixture of Coldplay and...mediæval music, specifically anything played by Jordi Savall and Hesperion XXI. What can I say - it works.

    p.s. oh, the things we think are going to forever traumatise our little ones in utero during those first pregnancies! Congratulations to you and your husband, and wishing you many joys and blessings with your daughter, and any little brothers and sisters to follow.

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