Love, angel, music, baby

"Inspiration comes from everywhere and anywhere. I've been inspired by landscapes, by vivid dreams, by other books, by movies, by art history lectures, by passing comments, by a fleeting emotion, by misremembering an entry in a dictionary. Beyond that, I couldn't say. How it all coalesces into fiction is a mystery, even to me." ~ Jacqueline Carey

I read this earlier today, when I wandered by Jacqueline Carey's website to jog my memory about the name of Terre D'Ange (TNB* is tentatively set in Arkhangelsk, and I had forgotten that the Kushiel setting was a "land of angels"—I didn't want them to sound similar), and I got to thinking about how I would answer this question ("Where do you get your ideas?"). Everything that she said fits for me as well (especially the part about dictionary entries), but I would also add ineffable feelings evoked by a twinkle of light, a color, a note from a violin.

Music, in particular, as I've noted here before, almost compels me to write. There are notes that fill my head and heart so completely, make me feel so intensely, that I think I might burst, or weep, or die. These notes feel as though they're swimming inside my brain: physically touching the pathways of my mind, as though they themselves are the firing of synapses and neurons connecting; it is better than a drug, though it only lasts for a fleeting instant. It's the instant after, the loss of that ecstatic feeling, that drives me to write. In my writing, when it works, when it's good, and my characters themselves are feeling those moments of ecstasy and agony, that's where the high lasts forever.

There are also moments in books and film, moments of romance, eroticism, and tragedy that make me long to find that feeling again, to capture it in the ecstatic notes of a written word. Tonight I saw Brokeback Mountain, and another piece of TNB's puzzle fell into place; my demon character, my fallen angel, will not be the love interest of the female protagonist; he will have a secret, his "fall": the love of another man.

Instead, the love interest will likely be another character, one whom I had already decided will be enchanted by a demon queen, a nod to Rillian and The Lady of the Green Kirtle in The Silver Chair. This was bothering me a bit; I thought the idea was "illegitimate" because it was inspired by a story of someone else's; then, while looking up names for my demon Lady, I moved from a search of celtic names to a search of fairy names, and stumbled upon the story of Tam Lin. To my surprise, I realized that Lewis himself had been inspired by this tale, for there was the enchanted knight in the underworld of a fairy queen, and even the mention of a green kirtle. And probably, the writer of Tam Lin heard a story in his or her youth, a folk tale passed on by verbal tradition, of a man tricked and taken by the queen of the fairies, and perhaps that verbal tradition began from a dream someone had, or an afternoon in a meadow listening to a lute whose notes struck moments of transporting ecstasy, like the fingers of the fairy queen herself plucking at one's neural pathways.

The notes of unattainable fairy music, as I drove home tonight from Brokeback Mountain, striking those flashes of painful beauty in my head that make me yearn for an outlet in words, came this time from Depeche Mode, in a song ironically about the desire for no words at all:

Words like violence
Break the silence
Come crashing in
Into my little world
Painful to me
Pierce right through me

And that is how the notes make me feel: they pierce right through me.

So there it is for tonight: the inexplicable mishmash of moments, music, and movies that will become—that must become—a story.

*The Next Book™