You can make stories out of anything. Anything? Yes, anything.
Ah, but can you make them tell a longer overarching story, using predetermined material (as opposed to writing an opera or a narrative series, all in one go, say?)
This time of year my Barbershop Quartet (I sing tenor with the guys) has a number of gigs booked, and of course no one is interested in anything but Xmas stuff. We have a pile of seasonal songs in our repertoire for the occasion, naturally, but the meta-arrangement of the sequence sometimes presents a puzzle.
Our repertoire for Xmas carols-and-others (at the moment) is 18 songs. Just running through them (with various verses) only takes about half an hour, and some of these gigs (strolling through an outdoor Xmas market for 2 hours) are a lot longer than that. We can just keep cycling through them and hope the random listeners don’t hear repeats (though we ourselves can find that pretty tedious). There’s little point in building a longer list, when it’s only used for a limited bit of the year, and we have lots of other repertoire to master.
Sometimes, however, the gig is a banquet with a captive audience. We only get to go thru the set once, and so it better be good.
In other words, it had better tell a story. And not as a single ballad, but as a sequence of songs.
Now, of course, there’s really just one overarching story for this celebration, and we all know what it is. So how do we position each entry for a very brief introduction, and let the audience picture a developing meta-story for the whole show, covering not just the original story but what it means to our community?
We turn it into a virtual pageant. For example:
This takes the audience through both the secular and religious highpoints of the season, and outlines a meta-story for the celebration, both high and low, using some of the aspects of each song.
There are short story collections that can be built like this — related and sequential presentations of a larger event and its penumbra.
Have you ever structured collections into a meta-sequence that bears a larger meaning — not just a continuing narrative, but one that reflects a larger story altogether?
Mad Genius Club 
4 responses to “Telling a story in songs”
I’m working on that right now with the next Familiar Generation short story set. Three are two “random” stories that are lighter, and four that are part of the loooong plot arc for the series. I need to balance “entertain and follow rise-fall-rise to peak” with “build series story in rough chronological order.”
I’ve done something similar before, and one of my beta readers suggested moving the first story to the end, so that the collection wrapped up with an ending similar to the novels. Had I done that, it would have caused problems with foreshadowing the next-to-last story, among other things. That reader did have a good point about mirroring the general flow of the novel plots.
That unintentionally ended up happening with that fanfic thing I did a few years back.
I ha done of the characters make a change in their life, and because I was blocking on a different project, I started writing what were intended to be ‘day in the life’ type things, that ended up irritating on the ripple impacts of the earlier decision. Which turned out to be wider than I’d thought, and ended up being a whole meta arc of short stories.
It was a lot of fun. I don’t know if I’ll ever pick back up the follow on project from that; a lot of life happened afterwards that kind of squashed things, but it was a fun experience. And it was reasonably well received on the fanfic board I put it up on. 🙂
Only kinda-sorta related, but…
A decade or so ago, I had an idea that could only work as a “literary” novel, and to date, I’ve only written a bit of it, because I just don’t think it would be well received by people I want to be read by, and would be rejected by the sorts of people who go ga-ga over pretentious literary novels.
Entitled 13 Songs By, For, And About [Band Name] (not sharing the band name because it’s fictional, and I don’t want anyone stealing it), the basic idea is there was a band that had an intense but short-lived fame some twenty years ago, a record label decided to do a tribute album by gathering a number of other bands together to do covers, tributes, or songs inspired by the band, and the novel is the liner notes for the album, an essay to accompany each song, each written by a different person. All fictional, of course. Part of the idea was to have the (non-existent) songs themselves tell a meta-story, through their titles at least, and possibly through their lyrics.
Yeah, my brain is pretty weird.
I did that with my poetry collection. I’m not sure how well I did it, but I tried to create a flow from one piece to the next.