Two years ago, I received an email inviting me to contribute to a short-story anthology on Joy Division. It would be a literary reimagining of their 1979 debut Unknown Pleasures – the only Joy Division album released during singer Ian Curtis’s lifetime – with each author assigned one of the songs and left free to interpret it however they liked. I was intrigued, especially when I was assigned New Dawn Fades, one of my favourites. I hadn’t listened to Unknown Pleasures properly since my difficult teenage years in the Welsh countryside, but I still remember the vertiginous feeling of hearing it for the first time and thinking, knowing, this album will change my life.

In those days, Joy Division meant sitting on my overcrowded school bus with my Walkman on my lap, staring at the seat in front of me as I listened, and then walking through the corridors of my school with the music still in my ears. Sometimes I pretended I was in a film, a drama that warranted the oceanic rush of my emotions. It meant listening to the music far too loudly on evenings when my parents were not in the house. We had no neighbours, so I could put it up to full volume and let every drumbeat, every bassline, shiver through my whole body. I experienced a fevered kinship with anyone who seemed like they might get it. So when I got the email, and put on Unknown Pleasures for the first time in years, the first staccato, fizzing beats of Disorder took me back in a way I hadn’t anticipated. What sort of story would I write? What would it mean to create something new from something already loaded with meaning for me?

Music and literature have long been symbiotic. The presence of the latter in the former peaked in the 1970s and 80s; last year, Paul Genders mourned in the TLS for a time when the “habit of advertising in song the contents of one’s bookshelves suggested, too, that being widely read might even have a distinct glamour about it”. Joy Division never shied away from referencing everything from Nikolai Gogol to William Burroughs and beyond. Literary allusions are everywhere in Unknown Pleasures – even the title references Proust. The works of literature Curtis was passionate about show themselves through every song, and become new and remade.

It wasn’t surprising that Joy Division appealed to me: bookish, nihilistic, caught somewhere between timidity and self-destruction

When I was younger, it didn’t occur to me to find Unknown Pleasures pretentious. It just made me feel seen. This was the sort of literature, music and connection I craved in my teens. I wanted there to be deeper meaning in everything. Ian Curtis read Sartre, Ballard, Kafka, Dostoevsky, and so did I. I don’t read this stuff any more. As we age, we grow embarrassed at our own seriousness, from remembering being that teenager sat in their bedroom, underlining words in a book. But as adults we can also forget the deep communion that music and literature can inspire, the sense of rightness clicking into place. Messages in a bottle, signals proclaiming who you are even as you first start to place yourself. It wasn’t surprising that Joy Division appealed to me: bookish, nihilistic, caught somewhere between timidity and self-destruction. There was intensity in every lyric, and even then I knew I wanted to be a writer, somehow, some sort.

I chose music first: piano from the age of three, guitar from 13. Writing came later, but as a way to help instil meaning in the music. This means the two mediums have always been intertwined for me. When I write, I create a playlist that I will listen to obsessively for weeks. I see the scenes before I write them; sisters in a swimming pool, a bus on a bleak mountain road. When I listened to New Dawn Fades, I saw a glowing computer screen in an empty room. A dark house made up of rooms in houses I had known.

During the writing of my story, I returned to Wales to where I grew up. It’s a beautiful place, but one that could feel hopeless as a teenager. I love it, with a reluctant, fraught and passionate love – and yet how do you let go of the feelings that shaped you, the memories that music calls up, learning to accept the bad as part of the good?

On a 90-minute bus ride to visit a friend, New Dawn Fades played on repeat in my ears as it had countless times before. There was snow on the mountain. Sheep blundered into the road. A change of speed, a change of style. There was a period of my late teens and 20s where going home meant failure. It meant my life had once more come crashing around me. It was me, waiting for me / Hoping for something more / Me, seeing me this time / Hoping for something else. It no longer means this.

Writing from music is at once deeply personal and impersonal. It adds another degree of separation, because you’re using it as a jumping off point. Yet, no two people will listen to the same song in the same way, or interpret it identically.

When it came to sit down and write the story, I was surprised by how personal it became. Others in the collection are more experimental, more abstract. It is pleasing now to read the stories and picture us all listening, refiguring, creating. Whatever we all did, the pathways mapped out in our stories mirror the territories mapped out in Unknown Pleasures: darkness and light, isolation and anxiety, the lovely mess of life. The legacy of the music, and what it meant to us, is laid out there on the page.

Music gave me an opening into lives I didn’t know about, things I didn’t imagine. But more than anything, it taught me it was possible to write your way out of something. Stepping stones, starting with dirge-like songs on my guitar, led to poems, short stories and, finally, a novel. Writing pulled me through, will always pull me through, no matter where I go. Trying to find a clue, trying to find a way to get out, Ian Curtis sings on Interzone. Through writing and music, we make sense. We process. We find our ways, hopefully, to get out.

• We Were Strangers: Short Stories Inspired by Unknown Pleasures (£12.99) is published by Confingo Publishing. Sophie Mackintosh’s debut novel, The Water Cure, is published by Hamish Hamilton, and has been longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker prize.