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Recently, on a whim, I decided to set Christina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market to music. I had a lot of fun doing that, as I expected. What I didn’t expect was that the experience would teach me something about writing fiction. But remember, art is holistic.

The reason I decided to share my experience of adapting Goblin Market to music is that it makes for an excellent teaching opportunity. In other words, I want to share with you what I learned from this, because I believe it can be very efficient for anyone interested in writing fiction.

At the end of this post, I’ll also share a link to the album, which you can stream or download for free.

What Is Goblin Market About?

No worries, I’m not going to elaborate too much on this. This is not an academic post. Rather, it’s about learning how my experience of setting Goblin Market to music can help us write better fiction. Still, it’s important to mention a couple of things about the poem, because they are important for understanding my thought process.

In case you are not familiar with Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, it’s a fairly long narrative poem with an incredible vocabulary and sense of rhythm. I mean, take a look at this:

Day after day, night after night,
Laura kept watch in vain
In sullen silence of exceeding pain.
She never caught again the goblin cry:
“Come buy, come buy;”—
She never spied the goblin men
Hawking their fruits along the glen:
But when the noon wax’d bright
Her hair grew thin and grey;
She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn
To swift decay and burn
Her fire away.

Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market

Modern-day “poets” could learn a thing or two from this. But that’s a post– or two! – for another day.

On the surface, Goblin Market is about two sisters – the cautious Lizzie and the impetuous Laura – and some mysterious goblin merchant-men who sell fruits. Laura thoughtlessly buys from them and becomes sick. Lizzie then has to help her, without becoming sick herself.

But, interpretatively speaking, that’s only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Decisions when Setting Goblin Market to Music

The poetic reality behind the simple surface is vast. In my post on authorial intention, you can find some brief references to the several interpretative possibilities in Goblin Market. These range from some straightforward, rather evident meanings such as allusions to drug abuse, imperialism and capitalism, as well as some feminist readings, to some much more exotic ones, that Rossetti almost certainly didn’t intend (though, you never know).

Still, no matter what interpretative meanings you’d like to assign to the poem, one thing is certain: It’s dark. As in, real dark. Take a look at the following excerpt that describes the goblin men attacking Lizzie. Not without reason, many critics see an allusion to sexual violence:

Lashing their tails
They trod and hustled her,
Elbow’d and jostled her,
Claw’d with their nails,
Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,
Tore her gown and soil’d her stocking,
Twitch’d her hair out by the roots,
Stamp’d upon her tender feet,
Held her hands and squeez’d their fruits
Against her mouth to make her eat.

Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market

With all these (and much more) in mind, and also because of my personal preferences as a listener and musician, I decided the Goblin Market music had to be dark, too. But here’s the first lesson regarding writing fiction: Darkness needs light to be understood as dark.

Goblin Market Music: Understanding Contrast

At first, my plan was to record an album that was, from beginning to end, purely postmetal. If you aren’t familiar with the genre, it involves distortion-heavy, slow and repetitive patterns, without an obvious chorus/verse progression. As I planned the way the poem would coexist with music, I realized one thing: As I mentioned above, you realize it’s dark only with a reference to light.

In other words, I realized I needed some calm, melodic passages, precisely to show the darkness that follows. I needed contrast. It’s a matter of pace. Indeed, if you take a look at my post on narrative pace, you’ll find the following reference:

Imagine watching on TV five Ferraris racing next to one another. You kinda assume they’re fast, but you’d get a perception of their speed only if you squeezed in a VW Beetle between them.

And so, the Goblin Market music I composed was based on the contrast between distortion-heavy and clean parts, the way Rossetti’s poem alternates between, on the one hand, hope and love, and, on the other, viciousness and hate.

When Plot Serves Affect

Another interesting thing I discovered setting Goblin Market to music was how easy it is to fall into the trap of putting plot first.

I often offer you the following advice – and they’re all interconnected:

• Put affect first.
• Begin with concepts.
• Stop focusing on plot.

And yet, that’s not always easy. Not even for me, I assure you. The reason is that it’s human nature – perhaps even literally – to focus on telling storiesAs I define them, storytelling refers to narrative whereas telling stories refers to plot. And the crux of the matter is that, for millennia, humans have focused on telling stories (plot) rather than storytelling (narratives). It’s the way our brains work, I suppose. Storytelling (narrative) is in the realm of art and is subjective; telling stories (plot) is in the real of facts and is objective - or, in any case, it presents itself as such.. We’re just eager to offer the “what happened” part.

So, how’s all that connected to the Goblin Market music album, and what does it tell us about writing fiction?

Which Came First, the Poem or the Music?

Initially, I was thinking to compose the music first and add the poem afterward, “making it fit”. It would’ve been a straightforward, mechanical process: Composing six bars here, adding an interlude, composing four bars there, and so on and so forth. Then, or so the plan was, I would read the poem in a way that would serve the music – as I said, “making it fit” the constraints of time etc.

Thankfully, at that point a serendipitous choice was made on my behalf. And I say it was made, because it wasn’t entirely conscious: I wouldn’t read the poem myself, but I would use a public-domain recording by someone else.

I think part of me wasn’t entirely confident about doing the poem justice (I find it hard to read someone else’s work). Another part just felt it would be easier if I had it ready. In any case, this decision had a momentous repercussion for the whole project:

I had to put the poem first, not the music.

What happened, then, was this: I divided the recorded reading into parts according to their affective weight; how each part of the poem felt like. And then, I began composing music based on what was there. It was a case of, quite literally, putting affect first, and “plot” (that is, the technicalities of music; tempo, number of bars, etc) second.

So it should be with writing fiction.

As I said, it can be challenging. It takes experience, practice, and ultimately time to learn to begin with concepts and affect, rather than with “Once upon a time there was a king/single business woman/astronaut/[insert character]”. Crucially, it also goes against much of the advice you find online, parroted ad nauseam by self-professed writing experts who have no clue whatsoever about writing fiction.

The Goblin Market Music Album

Before I leave you with some final tips, here’s a link to Goblin Market, as promised. You can even play it directly from Home for Fiction, if you’d like to listen to it while rereading this post:

If you’re on YouTube, you might prefer this:

Click to display the embedded YouTube video

So, what conclusions can we draw from all this? Though challenging to implement, the basics are simple, really:

• Experience comes first. Whether in the form of a personal experience (something you lived through and it affected you) or as a vicarious experience (in this case, being inspired and affected by a poem), no creative process worth a damn can occur without having had an experience first.
• Reflection comes next. Remember the post on imagination and creativity. An experience – indeed a memorable experience – should be followed by reflecting on it. What do you feel? Why? How is it connected to other, wider contexts? Reflection and abstract understanding allowed me to set Goblin Market to music – indeed, a Victorian poem to postmetal music – and can allow you to be original in writing fiction. That is, original in ways that matter.
• Affect is everything. Yes, I’m exaggerating. Writing fiction involves plot as well as stereotypes. Regardless of genre, stereotypes are also creatively important, because they allow you to offer your intended audience an anchor point; something to relate to and follow along. However, never forget this: Writing fiction as art is about instigating an affective reaction. Your goal as an author is not to tell a story. I’m amazed so many writers – and the self-professed experts we talked about – miss this entirely. Your goal is to make your intended audience feel something.

If I had to offer you only one grand piece of advice – let’s call it, tongue-in-cheek, unified writing theory – it would be this: Do things differently. Do things differently compared to others, and even compared to what you have done or you would feel comfortable doing. Question the rules.

Because, there are no rules in art.

Interested in another Gothic-inspired music album? Check The Undead Muse!