Scenes From The Song By Susan Sloate
Genre: Drama
Guest Post
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Do your characters seem to hijack the story or do you feel like you have the reins of the story? Explain.
I can’t turn my back on my characters for a second—you never know what they’ll grab when I do!
Take Dary Dover, for instance. He’s a minor character in my new novel, SCENES FOR A SONG—manager of the band who comprise the central characters in the story. Okay, I introduced him as a beautifully-dressed, elegant and obviously sophisticated guy with some secrets. I really don’t know why I did that; I didn’t expect the band manager to be more than a pop-in, pop-out kind of figure—there to help move the band forward, but not much more than that.
Did he ever surprise me!
The sneaky little mother turned around and became a central part of the band’s history, something I never dreamed of when I started!
In fact, he became so much a part of the band’s history that the band members themselves were still talking about him, more than 50 years later! (You’ll have to read the novel to find out why, but I promise the answer is worth it!)
Dary surprised me, for sure, but I also found myself surprised by the depth of the relationship between Jimmy and Mark, who become close friends almost immediately after their first meeting and end up sharing some of the most important moments of their lives. I thought they’d just be buddies who wrote songs together, but that’s not what happened at all. Their relationship was central to the story of the band, and it certainly does navigate some interesting twists and turns. Again, I didn’t see them coming when I started.
Of course, that’s partly because I wrote the novel for Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month), the crazy November marathon to write 50,000 words of an original novel in 30 days. If you haven’t done it, you can’t imagine the transformation you go through with your characters in that time. Nanowrimo shut down earlier this year, but it had a great 25-year run, and I did it for more than 12 years. It was always worth doing.
SCENES FROM A SONG was my 2018 Nanowrimo novel, and even as I wrote it—pushing ahead every day to meet my word count—I knew something good was happening. That was part of the magic of Nanowrimo—jumping in, mostly flying by the seat of your pants, making it up when you can’t think what else to do, telling yourself, “I’ll change that later”, and sometimes finding out it’s turned out so well you’re not going to change it!
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On Halloween Eve, 1961, in his dingy Bronx walkup apartment, seventeen-year-old Jimmy Welton hears the opening notes of a song in his head. Jimmy’s still mourning his firefighter father, who taught him to play the guitar but recently died in a house fire, leaving his family destitute. Jimmy takes this song, about all he misses from his life now, to the New York amusement park where he works after school. There, he meets Mark Morgan, a rebellious teen with his own band, who eventually invites Jimmy to join them. And the rest is rock’n roll history…
Their band, The GooseBumps, become a worldwide phenomenon, and the songs they write and sing together become the backbone of rock musical history. And the song Jimmy first heard on Halloween, “Wrapped in Gauze”, becomes the song that not only comforts him in that terrible time but also comforts others: Victoria, recently divorced and dealing with an out-of-nowhere family tragedy; Carolyn, whose final flippant words to someone in pain can’t be taken back; and Jack, battling back from unimaginable loss with the help of his cheeky therapist and a song he thinks he hates.
SCENES FROM A SONG is the story of a song that makes us smile, that breaks our hearts, that stays with us forever, and the very special band that started it all.
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Excerpt:
Jimmy hesitated for a moment, then took a good slug and felt it burn down into his stomach. Only then would he trust him-self to strum the first chords of “Bawk Bawk”. He’d written it in a sardonic mood one day, when he heard Debby playing “The Twist” on her record player and wanted to make fun of it. It had never occurred to him he’d end up playing it for a bunch of guys in a seedy bar after midnight.
Jimmy took a deep breath and launched into the song, speaking as well as singing it. After he’d written it, he’d realized he could even dance it a little, too, and he made gestures as well:
Imitating a chicken, clicking his heels together, clapping his hands. His father had told him he was a natural showman, so he gave it his all.
When he began to ham it up in the dance part, the boys be-gan to laugh, and they laughed right through to the end. Jimmy finished with the high whistle he’d learned the previous summer, and a final click of his heels before bowing to them.
Mark, Kellen and Hammy applauded enthusiastically, and Mick, who’d come back to see if they wanted another round, said to him, “Terrific, fella. Funniest thing I’ve seen since ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’. You a comic?”
“Are you kidding? He’s a musician!” Mark roared. “A great musician! And ‘Bawk Bawk’s a number-one hit if ever I heard one!”
He jumped onto the floor and imitated Jimmy, clicking his heels together, arms flailing like a chicken, and making the ‘bawk bawk’ sound. In a minute, Hammy and Kellen were following him.
“Play it again, Jimmy!” Mark shouted. “So we can dance it this time!”
About the Author
SUSAN SLOATE is the author or co-author of more than 25 published books. This includes 3 editions of Forward to Camelot, a time-travel thriller about the JFK assassination that became a #6 Amazon bestseller, was honored in 3 literary competitions and was optioned by a Hollywood company for film production. She also wrote the autobiographical Broadway novel Stealing Fire, which became a #2 Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release, and Realizing You (with Ron Doades), for which she invented a new genre: the self-help novel.
Susan has also written young-adult fiction and non-fiction, including the children’s biography Ray Charles: Find Another Way, which won the silver medal in the 2007 Children’s Moonbeam Awards. Mysteries Unwrapped: The Secrets of Alcatraz led to her 2009 appearance on the TV series MysteryQuest for The History Channel. She has also been a sportswriter and a screenwriter, edited the popular Kyle & Corey young-adult book series, man-aged two political campaigns and founded an author’s festival to promote student literacy in her hometown outside Charleston, SC. She has appeared in multiple volumes of WHO’S WHO IN AMERICA, WHO’S WHO IN ENTERTAINMENT and WHO’S WHO AMONG AMERICAN WOMEN.
Links To Scenes From The Song
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Sarcastically Yours, Jen 
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