"I can write without music, but I don’t like to. When I’m two pots of coffee deep, with my hoodie up, I’ll replay the same song for five hours in a row until the scene is complete or I sneak off to go get a taco from the stand down the street. It used to drive my roommates insane—hence the noise cancelling headphones they bought me to save themselves from having to listen to The Lonely Wild’s Buried in the Murder 100 times before 8am.

I’ve always been neurotic when it comes to listening to music.

The first song I ever remember feeling was Garth Brooks’ The Thunder Rolls. The song, if you’re not familiar, is about a woman who worries about her husband’s welfare on the road when he out in the middle of the night during a storm, only to discover the scent of another woman on him when he returns home. “And lighting flashes in her eyes and he knows that she knows...and the thunder rolls.”

I listened to the song so much I wore the tape so thin it broke. My mom bought me another, then my dad caught me listening to it and was a bit concerned that his nine year old son would be interested in a song about infidelity. I probably explained it poorly then. But it wasn’t the subject matter that intrigued me, it was that the song so perfectly crafted a brooding tone that bordered on the mystical. It’s still there in the song as I listen to it now. A haunting, bare emotionality that is unique to music.

When writing, it’s often difficult to find that emotionality and to maintain it though the several hours it can take to write a chapter. So music acts as a sort of coxswain to my writing, providing not only a sort of melodic pacing to the words and sentences, but a tonal consistency that can transform a scene.

In my novel, Red Rising, Darrow, a slave, infiltrates the ranks of the corrupt rulers of his society on Mars after they kill his wife. He’s a mournful, melancholic meld of hope and loss as he fights for his wife’s dream of freedom. Irish ballads are his soul. They capture the melancholy of him and his mission so perfectly that whenever I’m lost and don’t know where to take him, what trial to put him through, the ballads bring me back and help me remember the soul of the character and the book." -Pierce Brown