I was thinking about this today because, for the first time in months, I turned on my "writing inspiration" playlist while waiting to pick up Trevor from pep band tonight. Due to the limited space on my phone, I only have four songs on the list. Each song corresponds to a script that I have written or want to write in a series set in a place that I call, for lack of a better name, Dragon World.
The first song is Evanescence's "Bring Me to Life" which was my main inspiration when writing the movie script for The Mark of the Wizard: The Rogue and the Bride (I know ... I'm not great with titles). Before I had even started writing the script, this song inspired a number of scenes which I would later actually write. It has long been my hope that, should this script ever become an actual movie, I would be able to cut a trailer from scenes of the movie to fit this song. Interestingly, the story that the music trailer would tease is actually different than the actual movie.
The second song is "I Would Walk 500 Miles" by the Proclaimers. While I haven't written anything for this script yet, the story (which is tentatively titled The Mark of the Wizard II: A Singer by Trade) picks up a couple of years after the first one left off, but follows the story that I created for the first real adventure that I ever DM'ed. In it, characters discover the lost lore of the dragon riders and the tragedy that befell them. They are warned that another such tragedy is quickly approaching and that they must find the champion to help defend them. Straightforward hero stuff with some lost-love thrown in based on how The Rogue and the Bride ends.
Song number three was actually the last song to make my list. Fittingly, since the third script is a planned rewrite of my attempt to write Star Wars Episode II which I titled Descent into Darkness, the song is "No Light No Light" by Florence and the Machine. The idea of remaking the script that I enjoyed creating but ultimately could never see the light of day as a Star Wars movie was actually Steve Flemington's idea. I particularly like this move as it takes A Singer by Trade's more traditional storyline and turns it on its head. Suddenly, the champion who is supposed to save everyone becomes their greatest threat. Vader comparisons are intentional. One note: to make this transition from Star Wars to Mark of the Wizard work, I had to change the gender of the champion. In my D&D game, the champion was female; I would have had to completely rewrite both The Rogue and the Bride and Decent into Darkness to get that to even kind of work. And as I've already noted, I'm too lazy to even write the scripts I haven't started.
This leaves the final song, Genesis's "Land of Confusion," to wrap up this bizarre one-movie-longer-than-a-trilogy series. I don't have a title for the last script (although Land of Confusion would do nicely), but it takes my world to the brink of destruction, and so I had originally toyed with the title "The Last Hope" which would have been the title to the Star Wars Episode III script that I never wrote (I thought that would be such a great tie-in to Episode IV: A New Hope). Of all of the scripts I haven't written, this one has the clearest scenes in my mind but the least amount of plot. I really don't know where this one would take me.
I've also toyed with the idea of writing these as novels instead of as scripts, but one is already complete in script form, another is closer to script than novel, and ... well, lazy.
It has been nice to have these songs, and the scenes they produce in my mind, run through my head again.