As the O’Jays eloquently put it in their 1970s disco song: ‘I love music.’ And though I’m not sure I can stretch so far as to agree that I love ‘any kind of music’, I certainly love many types! Which makes interweaving music into the books I write an essential and really enjoyable aspect of the writing process.

Back when I was a young woman attending university to study French literature, my tutors drilled into me the power of writing to appeal to all of the reader’s senses. You don’t just want your reader to mentally ‘see’ the scene; you want him or her to smell, taste, feel and hear. The incorporation of music in a scene, then, is a great way to bring the setting to life for the reader.

Because I have wide-ranging music tastes, I like to bring in different kinds of music as I write. The Echoes of Love is set at the turn of the millennium, at that magical time when old bridged into new, which gave me an opportunity to include music that was current for the time but also more nostalgic, romantic Italian music. By tracing the following extract from the book, you can see how I try to create for the reader a feel for the time through the music choices.

Venetia sighed and changed the station to pop music. The radio show was streaming out back to back hits for the new millennium. The recognisable, tumbling strings of Robbie Williams’ ‘Millennium’ played out and she lost herself for a while in the exotic, lush harmonies and insistent rhythm.

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The next song came on, the Italian hit ‘la Fine del Millennio Vasco Rossi’, jolting her out of her reverie, its fast, hard rhythms such a coarse contrast. She wondered why the Italians had chosen such a rasping, unmelodic song to represent the millennium when they were such a deeply romantic nation.

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Frowning, she quickly retuned again, landing on a nostalgia radio station. Demis Roussos was singing his achingly romantic 1970s hit: ‘Ever and ever, forever and ever, my destiny will follow you eternally.’ At that moment, inexplicably, the words caught at her heart. Overwhelmed by that deepening of emotion which solitude bestows, Venetia’s throat constricted and for a brief moment her eyes welled up with tears of self-pity. They trembled at the edge of her lids, but she was quick to restrain them, chastising herself for being so weak and spineless.

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As you can see here, the music is not merely a backdrop to the story – like a piece of scenery on a stage with which the actor does not interact. Music has the power to impact on the emotional journey of the character. Robbie Williams makes Venetia feel happy and ‘lost’; Vasco Rossi jars her uncomfortably; Demis Roussos moves her and forces her to address grief lurking within.

Here is another example from the book:

Venetia sighed as she turned on the radio. She tuned into the Don Giovanni show and its Italian nostalgia songs and heard ‘E Salutana Per Me’ by Raffaella Carrà playing. Finding herself humming along to the beautiful, haunting melody, she smiled ruefully. ‘Credi davvero/Che sia un mistero/Quello che un uomo fa? Do you really think that it is a mystery what a man does? Sí, lo so che nell’amore/C’è chi vince, c’è chi perde, I know that with love there are those who win and those who lose…’ Would she win or lose? Despite all that she knew – of Paolo’s reputation as a womaniser, of her own heart’s mystery – Venetia was secretly beguiled by the notion that some tiny magic might befall her one day, and destiny would show its felicitous hand.

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The lyrics of the classic Italian song spark an emotional thought process, helping Venetia along the way to fathoming how she feels about Paolo.

So, I use music in my writing to help reflect or transform a character’s mood. But that makes the character’s experience of the music sound so solitary, insular. In truth, when I choose a song and write it into a book, I’m hoping for more than that for my character – I’m taking his or her inner world and connecting it to that experienced by others. The American writer Harry Allen Overstreet wrote:

I have my own particular sorrows, loves, delights; and you have yours.  But sorrow, gladness, yearning, hope, love, belong to all of us, in all times and in all places.  Music is the only means whereby we feel these emotions in their universality. 

That universality is what I hope for: to show that my one story is but a small piece of the jigsaw that is The Great Love Story.

Music – “the universal language of mankind”.