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Lauren

Okay. So I'm working on this new short story, and it was going great. I wrote the opening scene, wrote the second backstory scene, skipped ahead to a really fun scene right before the climax ... and then stalled out.

Partially, I know I'm stalled because the missing pieces are the hard parts—the emotional parts—and I know I have to really focus and dig deep to write them. And, well, not to make excuses, but when your job is to make other people's words sound great, sometimes it's too noisy in your head for your own story.

On my drive to the office this morning, I was berating myself a little bit for not having worked on my story in several months and trying to figure out why I've been so out of my new story's "zone." I was thinking about the last story I wrote and what I did to help myself concentrate on it ... and then it dawned on me: my new story is missing a soundtrack.

My last story was about a war photojournalist who comes home and has a little problem banishing the horrific images from his head, and the creative way in which he dealt with that problem. Every time I worked on it, I played Philip Glass's score for "The Hours," based on the novel by Michael Cunningham. For me, the mood and motifs of Glass's score became the mood and motifs of my story, and putting on my headphones was an easy way to literally plug back in to my fictional world.

In my new story, a Picasso painting plays a cameo role, and so I put that painting up on my computer desktop, thinking it would help me stay focused. But I don't think it's having the same effect because just seeing the artwork doesn't envelop my brain as completely as the music did. So my writerly homework this weekend is going to be to really reflect on the tones and themes in my new story and try to find an album (or two) that parallels my story.

Maybe then I can get back to writing.

What about you? Does music help you write?

Yesterday afternoon, I was talking with my friend Katie Darby (a recent graduate of the University of Evansville and our summer intern here at Writer's Digest Books) about Marisha Pessl's 2006 Mercantile Prize-winning debut Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Viking). It's an amazing 500+ page novel that combines nearly every genre (literary, historical, mystery, romance, coming of age, adventure ...) and contains illustrations and interdisciplinary in-text citations. It is both comedy and tragedy--sprawling and personal. Katie and I gushed about how much research Marisha must have done and how she must have put everything she'd ever known into this first book.

And then the inevitable question came: I wonder what she'll do next?

Being the empathetic souls we are (and writers ourselves), the mood surrounding the question changed from excited anticipation to anxiety. Oh, man. How's she gonna do it? What can she possibly do now? How does a writer follow up a first masterpiece? She must be under SO MUCH PRESSURE.

I've heard from writer and editor friends alike that these days, publishing a successful second book is actually much tougher than publishing a first because the sex appeal of the "fresh new voice" is gone. Plus, you've got the performance of the first book to live up to (or overcome).

Every year in the Premier Voices column in NSSWM, I hear from a round of debut novelists about their experiences. Any second-time (or third-time?) novelists out there want to tell us what it's really like?