In 2015, online literature platform Wattpad announced that submissions for the years edition of The Wattys awards were open. I was seventeen years old at the time, and in my first year in Uni, and I had also been writing on the platform for a little over a year. The awards were open to anyone around the award, and that year, they even included a special edition for stories written within the month of August, the #JustWriteit challenge.

I figured I would start a story and publish it, and improve my chances of winning; I’d be up against stories written from just within a month, instead of the thousands published all through the year, abi? I started what I thought would be a simple short story till I overheard the song coming from my sister’s room. Ava by Famy, a song that was featured in Season 5 Episode One of MTV’s Teen Wolf. In the scene, Allison Argent is dead (I will not apologise for this spoiler, it has been out since) and the entire group is reeling. They’re about to start Senior year and Scott and his crew are signing their initials on a bookshelf. The emotional scene has him sign the deceased Allison’s initials, and by the time I finally find the name of the song on Tunefind and listen to it repeatedly, I know the story I want to write. 

Ava by FAMY is such a mysterious song. It is the only song I can find by band FAMY on any streaming platform, including Soundcloud, but it also has over seventy million streams on Spotify alone. It is slightly upbeat, and coalesces beautiful melodies and a guitar strums with chilling lyrics, about a person’s struggle against their “primal and rabid urges”. I immediately reconciled that with the show, and then I had my idea. The idea ended up becoming Red Riding Hood, a story about a girl’s struggle with her identity, and a “wolf” that lurked in the recesses of her mind. I listened to the song every time I wrote from the perspective of Cyra, one of the main characters in the story, and by the time I published, I had come to associate it with her and her struggles. Out of over a thousand entries, Red Riding Hood went on to win the Watty that year, and I still never blow, but Ava changed the way I perceive music and writing.

Growing up, music and books and movies took me all over the world, and to worlds even beyond from my room in whatever city in Nigeria I was. After Ava, I became obsessed with scores, and always sought out original scores and soundtracks after movie releases, so I could open windows in my mind to the movies just by listening to them. It was also here I figured out one of my favourite writing tools. 

Do you ever watch a movie, and remember a scene, from the lines to the music playing in the background, to the feelings…the feelings. As I watched the Harry Potter movies, read the books and, finally found and listened to the Original score, composed by Alexander Desplat. The music threaded it all together, and as I sit here I recall ‘Lily’s theme’, a song used at the beginning of the Deathly Hallows Part 2, to heart-rending effect. There are no lyrics, but the score does as intended, and I feel the sadness of Dobby’s funeral and Hogwarts being under Dark Eater control.

Major movies, with the well documented and released scores, were easy to find. Christopher Nolan’s penchant for casting Michael Caine in movies is he almost always brings in Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer to score his movies, so from Batman Begins to Inception to Interstellar, I found a well of amazing movies and accompanying scores. I also found Ramin Djawadi, whose catalogue includes the entirety of the music for HBO’s Game of Thrones, Westworld, Pacific Rim and Marvel’s Eternals (2021). Then I dug deeper, and found that scoring went into video games and arrangements released as standalone albums. So I took the music and put it to work.

I found that when I needed to write a thing, I turned to the scenes I remember making me feel that way. I listened to Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight, used most recently in Dennis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) when I needed to write an emotionally rending letter from a character to her son. If I wanted to write a scene with slow tension that builds into a fast-paced action sequence I would open a blank document on my laptop, plug in my headphones, and play Attack on Titan’s “Ashes on The Fire” by Kohta Yamamoto or “Casino Brawl” by Ludwig Göransson, from the score for Black Panther (2018). 

It helps to set the mood for whatever I am writing, and with music composed with the intention of evoking emotion, my thoughts are filtered by the instruments and melodies, and whatever I need is brought close to the surface; from bittersweet memories as in Keegan Dewitt’s Hoosier Hill, to the regret of words unsaid encapsulated in Healah Dancing by Keaton Henson, or the fearlessness of charging at from a vast army in Audiomachine’s “Second Deviation”.

I also realise that listening to music will not always work, and there are things you need to write in silence, but in that stillness, I find that when I reach for the feelings, I still find them nestled in the many songs I’ve listened to, and then I can go on.

Swim through the oceans, everyone. Write.