Music: The Language of Mood

Every three months or so, I have a week long period of really bad depression, and I hate it because it's not the kind of depression I can put to good use. It leaves me unable to think, feel or write anything.

Earlier this month, I was writing some very important death and funeral scenes for my novel, Bright. How does a person write about losing a child? I have lost children, but still...how do you write about it so that a reader will "feel" it with you. How do you write about it to where it doesn't feel "manufactured" or "fake"? I kept trying, but my dysphoria or dysthymia or whatever the hell it is just wasn't letting me express myself.

I was watching the movie NUTS starring Barbara Streisand during this period...not exactly the kind of movie one wants to watch if they want their mood lifted. But I didn't want my mood lifted...I just wanted it exorcised so that I could effectively work with it for these important moments in my book.

I found 2 pieces of music from the original score, and listening to them was like magic. In one scene, Claudia is telling her attorney, "Maybe I am crazy." The music used during that moment was so sad and in a sense, frightening, like how scary it is to admit or to wonder if everyone is right about you, if you're the only one who isn't seeing reality. The music is very beautiful and meloncholy, and sort of soars sadly. It then felt so easy to write about the deaths of 2 children and how their parents feel inside.

Here is a youtube I made of the music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cqD7...

I have made tremendous progress on Bright the past week or so. I think it will need considerable editing and trimming of flab before it's truly at its greatest, but I love the story and the characters so much. Where Crush was a story of sexual abuse, Bright is another highly personal statement for me: For anyone who has ever suffered SPIRITUAL abuse, especially young people whose family members cannot accept them being gay, or "different" in any way, I hope Bright will speak to them too.

Here is an excerpt from one of those difficult scenes:



This baby is female, tiny. It doesn’t matter that her life was cut even shorter than D.J.’s. She’s a person, and she’s our child. Upon Natalie’s request, the baby is retrieved fully intact, no bigger than my pinkie nail. At first, her amazing size makes us call her Itty Bitty, or Itsy Bitsy…But for her birth/death certificate, we officially name her “Betsy Marie” (Kendall’s middle name).

And as with DJ, we insist on a real funeral, headstone and all. She’s a real person, and we demand that everyone see her as a real person. Now comes the worst revelation. We all three look at her, and it’s a blade that cuts through our love for her, a feeling that makes us all hide our faces inside of our hands in separate, secret shame. I’m revealing my own heart, but surely Wawa and Nattie feel this way as well. It’s hard to see Walter’s daughter the way I saw D.J. My son was reddish pink, his stillborn heart and immature cartilage ribs visible through his alien skin, and though his eyes were still sealed closed, he had a face I could call human.
Because she was confined to a slender tube and not allowed to bloom, our Betsy is deformed. She never would have survived outside of the womb. Walter’s inconsolable and doesn’t want to look at the baby’s malformations, but I swallow my fear and look. The baby doesn’t have a face, or even the beginnings of a face…
“She wouldn’t have been able to take nourishment,” I tell him softly.
He does not cry this time. His eyes are dry.