Tuesday 16th June 2020

Music plays an important part in my writing.  I tend to listen to orchestral soundtracks as I write and edit, choosing from a range of albums and playlists that I match to the mood of the piece I’m working on.

Recently, I’ve been heavily into Youtube composers.  They take classic scores, remix them or merge them with other scores to create mashups.  So I’ve been listening to gems such as Pirates of the Caribbean mixed with Dark Knight.  They’re really good.

One of the few soundtracks I can’t listen to and write is Star Wars.  That music is so iconic for me, that upon hearing it, my mind is taken to a galaxy far, far away.

But Youtube rotated onto a remix of the Battle of Endor themes today and it had a strange effect.

Back when Return of the Jedi was released in 1983, we didn’t have the internet so we had very little in the way of spoilers.  A bunch of Ralph McQuarrie pictures had been released in the January and I remember pouring over that picture of Jabba’s Sail barge on fire and wondering what it was.

The first clip I saw of the film was on the Saturday Morning TV Series No 73.  Sandi Totsvig was Ethel and that’s pretty much all I can remember about that program, despite watching it religiously.

They had a clip from Return of the Jedi and I was beyond excited.  We’d just got a Betamax video recorder and you can bet I was recording so I could watch that clip again and again.

The clip was actually 2 scenes.  The first when Luke & Leia steal the speederbikes and go chasing after the scout troopers, and another scene as the fleet arrives at the Death Star to realise that shields are still up.

But in the background, the music from Into the Trap played.  Whenever I hear that track now, I’m instantly carted back to my excitement watching that Saturday Morning TV Show.

I was so hyped for Return of the Jedi.  It was the epic end of the Saga that had consumed my childhood.  Far from being sad at the end, I was just excited to find out what happened after everything had been left on a knife edge after Empire.  Those 3 years between movies had felt like the longest 3 years of my life.

So now, listening back to that music I remember the excitement I felt as a child.  How I’d speculated the story would come together.  How it would be epic.

It made me think of the outline I’m currently working on, made me draw parallels with how I felt as a child and how I want readers to feel.

The conclusion was that it changed how I saw the climax of this story.  It’s become much more epic and in doing so, this outline has taken a step forward.

Of course, it now means setting up all the things needed to make it epic, and that’s a lot of moving pieces.

But still, it’s progress.

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