Craft Talk 5

June

Hey everyone,

Welcome back to another Craft Talk! I hope you’re all keeping well. I’m gonna spoil June here so if you haven’t read it please do go and read that before reading through this.

So, June…

This was an interesting one to write if not just because it’s the idea that has existed the longest out of all of the short stories. As always I start with a sentence and in this case it was ‘A lady in a post apocalyptic world decides what the last song she thinks she will ever hear will be. The twist being she meets a musician at the end.’ I had this idea maybe a year or so ago, I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do with it, whether it was a novel focused around this person and music. Just as an aside music is something that is integral to me and my writing process, I’m not someone who can write in silence, I totally understand and respect the people who are completely absorbed in their world and don’t need any background noise. For me, I need to find the right sound, the right piece of music that accompanies the story I’m writing. So this story in particular has personal weight to it, it’s me expressing the importance of music. I sat on this idea for a long time and it wasn’t until the idea of ‘February’ came into my head that I started to think about different people occupying this world and the lady deciding on her last song would be one of the people figuring out a way of life in this new desolate world. So I started writing the other short stories first because I didn’t quite have a good enough grasp on the world to tackle the ‘last song’ story. When I finished May, I felt like I was ready and so I sat down as I always do and began to write out June in one sitting exactly the same as the other short stories.