Musician Brian Corley doesn’t have to be talked into the idea of having fun with writing. As a longtime songwriter, he often gives himself the goal of writing a song every day, sometimes playing around with silly prompts to see what ideas might spark but never having any specific expectations. In Corley’s latest YA novel, GILM!, teenager Geoff Smith begins writing a song under significantly more stressful circumstances.
The new kid in school, Geoff is trying to find his place in Portland, Oregon, after moving from Texas. When he finally drums up the courage to ask out Corinne Shelby, she gives him a challenge: If he can write her a song where he can manage to find a word that rhymes with “film,” she’ll take him out for pizza. Struggling to figure out the rhyme, Geoff searches his home for inspiration. He finds a strange book that belongs to his eccentric father, one that claims to contain real magic spells. On a whim, Geoff performs a spell for wish fulfillment, wishing for “a song with a legitimate rhyme for ‘film’—a real word that people used.” As a result, Geoff creates a brand-new word:
For the first time since the move, Geoff felt in place. No longer were his feet in Portland while his heart remained in Houston. He was finally of one mind and body.
And he knew precisely what needed to come next.
He jogged up the winding staircase to his room and flopped into a purple midcentury-modern chair next to the tiny white desk he’d picked out at an estate sale with his dad. He flipped open his laptop, tuned his guitar, and tested his mic. “Rock test, one. Rock test, two.” The volume gauge ran green as he strummed his guitar a couple of times. You wanted it green. If it seeped into yellow occasionally, that was fine, but never red. You’d be distorting at red, and unwanted distortion was bad. “Alright, let’s do this,” he said to himself. Geoff dialed in the BPM for the AI-assisted drummer and hit record.
Let’s go to a movie,
Let’s go see a film,
Nothing rhymes with that word,
So, I’ll invent one: GILM!
GILM! GILM! GILM!
It’s totally legitimate.
GILM! GILM! GILM!
Yeah, everybody’s saying it.
It could be a verb,
Or it could be a noun,
And everybody’s saying it, all around the town.
Thus begins an adventure about finding your place in the world, young love, and the undeniable magic of a catchy song. Kirkus Reviews calls GILM! “a short, catchy indie-rock love song of a book with underlying depth.” Even better? Corley actually wrote the song “GILM!” and recorded it with his band, The Mars McClanes.
In fact, “GILM!” was a song before it was a story. “When I’m in songwriting mode, I try to write a song a day, and when folks come over, we’ll share music we’re working on. I was working on this weird punk song, …and we would all laugh about it,” says Corley. “You write stream-of-consciousness every once in a while to get something on the page, and ‘GILM!’ was one of those songs. I went to visit a friend, he suggested recording ‘GILM!,’ and came up with the lyric ‘inspiringly insidious.’ ” The phrase “inspiringly insidious” caused a spark in Corley’s mind, as he wondered what it would mean for a song to be “inspiring” in an “insidious” way. He enjoyed the thought experiment so much that he decided to expand the song into a short story.
But when Corley sat down to write it as a short story, he got to ten thousand words and realized he was only through Act I of a book. “It was a really fun process of trying to make sense out of a nonsense song,” he says. Corley loves being an indie writer because it means he has the freedom to write whatever he feels like first, without worrying what publishing category it might fall into. He says that GILM! just made sense as a Young Adult story, especially when it came to Geoff’s struggles to fit in as the new kid in school.
“This was a story that came out naturally for me,” he says. “I was the new kid … five different times, and there’s nothing like it; it’s not the same as being the new adult at a job. And when you figure things out at one school and you move again, [what] worked for you at the old school won’t necessarily help you at the new one. That was the story that unfolded for me, so Geoff was really easy to write. And then, well, I’m his dad’s age, so that’s another character that came out really naturally for me.”
Corley also added the personal touch of his deep love for the city of Portland. At the beginning of GILM!, Geoff is still struggling with missing his old town and comes to discover a love for Portland as he makes his way through the plot. “I moved to Portland in 2018, and I love it here,” Corley says. “I love the mix of creatives who live here, and so many natural spaces. It’s such a unique town, and I’ve never been anywhere else like it, so I hope that comes through in the story.”
An established songwriter before he started writing fiction—unless, as he says, you count the stories he wrote as a creative third grader—Corley found that many of the skills in his music toolbox corresponded with writing novels. “There’s a moment in any creative endeavor when you get out of your own way,” he says, “because you realize you can only be yourself, you can’t try to emulate anyone else. Once that happens, then the creative process flows, and that’s the same for writing fiction as it is for writing songs. The practice of writing songs every day certainly carries over as well and helps with the discipline it takes to finish a long-term project like a book.”
To bridge any other gaps in his skill set, Corley dove into research. He loves being “a learner,” and so when he first tried to write a book, he went on YouTube to look up interviews where his favorite authors, like Brandon Sanderson and Deborah Chester, talked about craft. He read writing blogs and books on writing, took workshops on writing, joined critique groups—anything to pick up new tips and build his skills. “I think it’s great to have a learner’s mindset,” he says. “That’s what’s cool about taking on a new skill, is that you get to experience that.” Above all, Corley believes that “a great story is a good mixture of emotion and craft, something that you can tell someone poured their heart into.”
Kirkus praises GILM! for its “lovely character dynamics” as well as its “clear and assured prose,” and promises that “tween and teenage readers should approve.” Corley has written two previous YA novels, Space Throne and Ghost Bully, for which he has received praise from not just Kirkusbut also publications like Publishers Weekly and BookLife. He is a member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association and promises that he’s always working on something new to share with his readers.
Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn.
