Daniel Soule and The InkWalker Collective

The InkWalker Collective was born when Adrian Walker (The End of the World Running Club, The Human Son, etc) and myself got talking about how music influences our writing. We decided to set out on a writer’s side quest, gathered a group of fellow authors, and collaborated on a series of themed playlists. We’ve been releasing these to the writing community one by one.

In the meantime, I’ve been chatting with our fellow collaborators to find out more about how music influences their work.

I managed to catch up with horror and speculative fiction writer, Dan Soule, a while ago. He’s been a big contributor, and as a lecturer and writing coach, he knows a thing or two about getting the most out of your writing time.

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Do you listen to music while writing?

Yes, but it is a relatively recent thing. Since, Covid-19 and lockdown to be precise. Before I would write in silence, and a lot of my novel writing was done through dictation in a first draft. However, being trapped inside with my wife, then six-year-old son and eleven-year-old daughter, kinda screwed up that process. And I wrote a lot on the road, while in airports and hotel rooms working away for my day job. But locked inside a house meant that the ambient noise and just the constant “Dad, will you...” meant I needed to block some of that out. Music helped along with some noise cancelling headphones.

I have always liked working out to music, and I find it helps take me to creative places and think through story ideas, plot problems and characters, while I’m hitting the bag or doing a long spin, or some such.

When writing, do you listen to songs with lyrics or are you mainly on the instrumental side?

Mostly instrumental, a lot of drum and bass for the pace. But it depends on what I’m doing. With The InkWalker Collective I’ve enjoyed finding songs that set the mood for a scene.

You write horror, has that genre steered your musical tastes at all?

Hmm, not really but the InkWalker Blood and Terror Spotify Mix is bang on for the darker side of writing. Like good writing in any genre there is light and dark. Apex Twins ‘Come to Daddy’ was on repeat during the final stretch of my last novel Savage. That song kinda sums up a lot of Act 5 in that book. But in general, horror only works because there is light. There must be moments of humour, levity, and quite possibly redemption.

I like that. Like there are no shadows without light...

“Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers...”

Ursula Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness

Indeed. That reminds me of a line I wrote for the book I just finished called The Jam. One of the characters describes herself as:

“I am the shadow cast by the morning star.”

Ooo that’s lovely! Ok we could go off on a tangent here, so let’s bring it back! If you could share one track that sums up your main character, what would it be and why?

Tori Amos’s ‘Precious Things’ helped me pin down a mood and perspective for a WIP about a mother, pregnant with twins, who was a survivor of an infamous exorcism twenty years previous. There is an internal strength in Tori Amos’s work, and it explores a female emotional landscape which I’ve always found compelling and interesting.

Cool! At what stage in the writing process did you find this track?

Planning.

Did it help you to write the character, or was it a retrospective perfect fit?

Not so much. It’s like a mood combined with a perspective. But I think quite cinematically so I like to think ‘What would be the soundtrack for this scene,’ just like I think, ‘What is the POV and therefore, where is the camera, what is the lighting etc?’

I’m exactly the same. For me it comes from doing Media Studies and researching how music plays into certain scenes and why those songs are selected. It always fascinated me! What drew you to The InkWalker Collective as a project?

As above: lockdown and my usual writing environments weren’t available. Also doing stuff with people is cool. Doing stuff with other writers is super cool.

Agreed! So far The InkWalker Collective has ten playlists... do you think it's missing any?

I’ve not thought about it. I kind of just mooch about and enjoy what’s there. There are too many algorithms feeding me what they think I want. My previous behaviour shouldn’t be a predictor of my future self. The algorithm and online life have the danger of becoming a kind of living death – liquifying us in the reverberate echoes of the sameness of opinion. I grew up with record shops and browsing for things you didn’t know you liked. The InkWalker playlists are great for this. I discovered the Cancer Bat’s cover of Sabotage – brilliant! I didn’t know I needed that in my life.

Okay for my personal data collection, do you get "frisson"; the physical feeling of chills and shudders while listening to certain pieces of music? (I have this working theory that creative people are more susceptible to it than non-creatives) - If so, what's your favourite frisson-fuelled track?

Yes. Led Zepplin’s version of ‘In my time of dying.’ It gives me goosebumps every time. Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’ same – that whole album is perfect.

Do you have any specialist musical interests?

Yes. I’m fascinated by Songlines - as in the Aboriginal oral memory which are songs but also a passport, a map, a repository of all their cultural, botanical, ethical, historical and religious (basically everything) memory. Songs were the original vehicle for stories which were our mnemonics storehouses of memory and culture. It’s kinda cool to think we sang our way across the globe, and there’s good evidence that we did. For example the same story for the origin of some constellations exists in ancient Greece, Siberia and with Canadian first nation peoples.

Bruce Chatwin the travel writer wrote a book called Songlines. I read a lot of Walter Ong and Marshall MacLullan as an academic, which was all about oral cultures moving to print and print to digital. Ong did work on showing how the Bible was originally an oral text like Homer's work. I used the idea of songlines and identity in Neolithica and it linked to my research on nationalism. In the novel songs help insulate them from the negativity of "the boy" who was sacrificed at the dawn of civilisation at Gobekli Tepe as humanity cut down all the trees, planted cross and forgot their songlines.

That’s incredibly emotive, and remembering the oral tradition of storytelling is important. Historically those stories were a staple part of people’s learning and education.

Well I think that’s a strong note to end on (pun intended) - thank you Dan!

You can find out more about Dan’s and his books on his website: https://dansoule.com 

And you can follow him on Twitter: @WriterDanSoule

You can find out more about The InkWalker Collective, along with links to every playlist on Spotify, here.