I'm still a story guy, I'm still most moved by meaning, but I've discovered how much pleasure there can be in the music of words as well, and how powerful it is when you have both. And it wasn't until.maybe last year that I fully embraced poetry as a reader and a writer and allowed my mind to open up to that level of abstraction. It wasn't until around the time I started Warm Bodies-I was 26-that I really understood how much the sound of the language interacts with and amplifies the meaning. Becoming a songwriter forced me to pay more attention to the rhythm and texture of words, and I started to apply those same musical standards to my prose. But even while resisting, I found myself gravitating toward increasingly poetic fiction. I resisted the idea behind poetry, that the sound of the words could be as important as their meaning. It was just the tool I used to tell the story and make people see what I wanted them to see. Those kinds of coincidences are just eerie, but then there are the bigger, more meaningful connections, like the part where R says the apocalypse happened slowly and sneakily, one compromise at a time, "seemingly isolated incidents until the moment they all merged." That one has been haunting me lately Feels like we might be at that merging moment now.īut for a long time, I didn't think much about the language itself. Literally the next day, I found out this exact same station had been abandoned by the SPD as the area was occupied by racial justice protestors. I've been doing livestream readings on Patreon and I just did one last week where two Black kids take shelter in the abandoned police station in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood, noting that it looks like it was vacated intentionally instead of destroyed like the others. Sometimes it's just odd little details like characters commenting on how looters took all the toilet paper, but sometimes it's eerily specific, like descriptions of post-apocalyptic Seattle that almost perfectly match what's happening there now. And the parallels just kept coming when the pandemic hit.
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