Gráinne O’Brien: I began to see SOLO not as lines of poetry, but as bars of music . . .
Twenty years ago, my first boyfriend broke up with me on a black mental bench in the middle of a car park in Ennis, Co. Clare. And as if this wasn’t a tragic enough image, I am devastated to confess to you, I was wearing double denim. The noughties were truly a dark time for some of us, sartorially speaking. When I called home looking for a lift because I was seventeen and still learning to drive, my mother informed me that my father was already on the way.
This memory, this image, of a broken-hearted girl waiting to be picked up by the father she adored, was the foundation that SOLO was built around.
I wanted Daisy’s story and experiences to reflect those everyday dramas that teenagers must go through that are enormous and important but often dismissed by the adults in their lives. Many adults forgot what it was like the first time our heart was broken, or the first time we experienced that much worse and traumatising heartbreak, the end of a friendship. But those moments consciously or unconsciously inform the adults we become and the books that we read at that stage in our lives often stay with us long after the sting of those moments’ fades. Teenagers deserve books that belong only to them, that reflect their lives and their experiences, that tell them there is hope and light among the darkness, but also that their problems is real and deserve to be acknowledged.
As a bookseller I have been thrilled with the rise in popularity of verse novels. They’re a tricky genre to write. The author is required to communicate to the reader what the characters are going through, in their lives and in their emotions, and drive the plot along, without traditional paragraphs and long sentences. The chapters are poems. Everything is left exposed. Because of the spacing and art often used to give shape to what they are writing, authors usually have a more limited word count. Verse novels have nothing to hide behind. They are unprotected and vulnerable. In short, they are exactly the right kind of book to tell the story of a heartbroken teenager.
The more I outlined and drafted Daisy’s story, the clearer it became that the only option for telling the story about her and her life, was to write (or compose if you will) SOLO as a verse novel. I was terrified. I had never written a verse novel before and had no idea where to begin. I read other verse novels, and poetry collections, and watched poets reading their own work on YouTube. I bought Poetry for Dummies (which is an excellent guide to understanding poetry by the way). I listened to Frank Skinner’s Poetry Podcast (also excellent). I fell down a rabbit hole of poetry structure and theory, drowning in self-pity that my ability didn’t match my ideas.
I was, as you can imagine, very fun to be around. Salvation came, as it so often does at times of crisis for many people, in music. I am blessed to be a member of Ancór, a chamber choir in Limerick that I have sung as a part of for thirteen years. It was at one of our rehearsals, while we were singing BWV 78 by J.S. Bach, in preparation of a performance for local Leaving Certificate music students who study the work, that I figured out what to do with Daisy and her broken heart. I recently opened an old music folder and found SOLO’s first completed poem, hastily scribbled down during that rehearsal written on the back of sheets of music and on the folder itself.
Daisy doesn’t exist without music, so her story couldn’t either. SOLO wasn’t just flowing, it was marching. It had a steady beat, and I began to see it not as lines of poetry, but as bars of music. Music is everything that Daisy is and loves and honouring that was the only way to tell her story. The instructions composers give musicians on their pieces are poetry in themselves, and I took as much inspiration as I could from those geniuses.
In SOLO, each poem begins with an instruction, that tells the reader what it is about to do, the same way a composer instructs their orchestra with just one word. The set up for each poem sets the tone for what is going to happen. I relied on the expertise of much more experienced musicians than me to match the right term to the right poem. Sometimes, when researching terms, I would come across one so beautiful, I would get a poem idea there and then. Other times, once a poem was written, I went looking for a term that would complement it best.
Music also gave me the opportunity to imagine a new way the poems could look on the page. Whether in was in the poem, Diminuendo, where the words become smaller as it progressed, or the poem Bar, which has four syllables to each line, to mimic a bar with a 4/4 rhythm, music provided all the inspiration and ideas I needed to make do my best to make SOLO something unique for its reader.
I am nervous and excited that SOLO is making its way into the world. Daisy and her new friend Flora are the kind of girls I wish I could have been friends with. I admire their talent and their passion for the things they love. I hope very much that the readers of SOLO love these complicated girls as much as I do.
(c) Gráinne O’Brien
About SOLO by Gráinne O’Brien:
A novel in verse about teenage love and friendships, lost and found.
Daisy can feel like a solo act at home. On the outside of her twin brothers’ intense relationship, she leans towards her parents, particularly her father, for support. As a passionate classical musician, she is not wildly popular at school, but she has one close friend and a life filled with musical performance. Her life is turned upside down when her boyfriend suddenly breaks up with her, and Daisy is left disconnected from her one true love, music.
When she makes a new friend at school, mysterious Flora, Daisy finds a glimmer of peace in her chaotic life. Just as everything seems to be getting better, they all fall apart. Family tensions heighten as Daisy’s dad falls ill and Daisy needs to decide should she find her way back to who she was or look towards who she is going to become.
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