6. What is one way to write a scene with music?

I’m a semi-professional pianist and I use music scenes all over my stories. As I get into this, one disconnect might be that I use more music than actual songs. (If you need a specific song with specific lyrics, that’s a hard nut to crack.) But if you just need music to form a song, I would say express what the sound/harmony/melody is doing in metaphor. For example, if it’s a detective story, and I were to take a stab at this metaphor idea, it could look like this:

Anticipation settled across the room as the singer took the mic. She parted her lips, and the first, few haunting notes floated on cigar smoke, vanishing into air. Then her tones moved in a silvery river, a river and a walk and a lonely path where people had seen too much pain and never enough hope, and the music flowed and the children cried but dawn never came, and darkness stalked the streets and the harmony hit my heart with murderous blood and bitter tears, and all the years of this lonely, hopeless chase rose in the haunting music and passed like ghosts before my eyes.

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