I mentioned a while back that I love having playlist pages in my novels. The reason that I started wanting this in all of my books is because of the novel “Everything, Everything” by Nicola Yoon, since she has a list of songs at the end of the book that make her think of her novel, and I wanted to do that, too. So, I thought I would share with you how I pick the songs for my playlists.
First of all, for some playlists, I make them after I’m done writing. The novel that comes to mind for me is “I Hate My Roommate”, since when I was writing it, I wasn’t really big on having writing playlists yet, so I made one afterwards. The songs still fit for the novel, but it was made afterwards.
I first started making writing playlists for the novel “Cora”, because I was forcing one of my friends to make me a playlist in exchange for me writing a novel with their ideas (no, this was not a fair payment, and yes, there is a post coming about this in the near future). I started with an original character playlist creator, which you can checkout in the backs of almost all of my novels. This was fine, but I found that it was really repetitive when I was picking songs, and I wanted to do something different.
So, when I was coming up with ideas for “Healing x3 Part One”, I decided that I wanted to include five to ten songs that represented how Nora felt about each of the male characters. I found that this allowed me to include more songs that represented the characters and the vibe of the story, rather than just a random song the character would listen to at a party, which is one of the songs that the OC playlist creator had me do.
As for my cowboy novel, I made the playlist based on vibes. There’s a lot of country love songs on that playlist, which is not really my vibe, but I do like the playlist. It feels more fitting for the project than the OC creator I was using, so I like that a lot more.
For the new projects I’m plotting, I think I’m going off the rails with it. One of the novels I’m working on, the male main character has a motorcycle and is into 80s music (I’m a simple woman, don’t question my motives), so on top of making a playlist for the project itself, I’m also going to be releasing a playlist for what he would listen to on his bike rides, which also includes bangers from the 2010s. But, something interesting I’m doing with this particular playlist is dividing it into two sections: songs that remind her of Archer (the male MC) and songs that remind him of Valerie (the female MC). I’m having a lot of fun finding songs for each of them. Music is also a big thing for Valerie, so there will be a playlist of all the songs she's listening to throughout the novel.
The other novel I’m plotting I’m making like a movie soundtrack for it, so if you listen to the playlist from start to finish in the order that it’s in the playlist, then you’ll get the emotional vibe of the novel. Yes, it’s a lot of work, but there’s already so many songs that I want to use, and I think it will be a unique way of showing the vibe to my readers.
Making writing playlists is actually really fun, once you figure out what theme you’re going for, and for me, it changes novel to novel.
That's all for now, folks!
-C
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