How much of the opinions shared in The Crane Wife reflect your own? For example, Amanda, George’s daughter, rages at cyclists and their “crotch-fitting tights and their air of ethical entitlement”. I didn’t use it, but it just made it the perfect theme song. Now, that is a great opening line to a novel. The first lines of that song are, “I woke up and the world outside was dark”. I wanted that feeling of yearning and energy.Īnd More Than This is named after a Peter Gabriel song. That’s a good running song, a yearning song. The first one, The Knife of Never Letting Go, was a Muse song, Map of the Problematique. The Chaos Walking series had one for each. The song doesn’t pertain to the book, but the emotions and the atmosphere does. It’s a beautiful, atmospheric song about a poet. Mercy Street by Peter Gabriel was A Monster Calls. What other songs have you used to set the mood of your books? That’s so important, how you leave a book. I also knew the last line of The Crane Wife. I pick theme songs for my books not because I’m writing about the song, but because the song makes me feel how I want my readers to feel. It was exactly how I imagined it feeling.

And then I heard The Decemberists’ song, The Crane Wife 1, and it was perfect. They have a function, but they are not everything. And that stories are vitally important, but they’re not everything. A major one is how a story is different depending on who tells it.

I could feel I was responding to something.Īnd then I got the other ideas contained within the book. I heard the story of the crane wife then. I was in love with her – as you are when you’re five. My kindergarten teacher was Japanese-American.

More than this patrick ness sequel