By: Virginia A. Romero

From Lyrics to Literature

Dave Pomfret didn’t set out to write a novel. For more than twenty years, he built his career as a songwriter, capturing love, loss, and the messy beauty of being human in three-minute bursts of melody. But one day, a story arrived whole, urgent, and impossible to ignore. “It arrived like a melody sometimes does,” Dave recalls. “Unexpected. Fully formed. And absolutely refusing to be ignored.” That story became Lilly, a haunting tale of a man whose imaginary daughter becomes terrifyingly real. What started as a fleeting inspiration soon grew into a novel that delves into the boundaries between fantasy and reality, exploring the lengths one will go to preserve a connection to the past. Pomfret’s background in songwriting shines through, as his prose carries the same emotional depth and resonance found in his music, drawing readers into a narrative that is as compelling as it is chilling.

The Rhythm of Prose

Transitioning from songs to storytelling surprised even Dave. Songs, after all, were his language: tight, rhythmic, and structured. But Lilly demanded space to breathe. Its characters needed room to unravel. Its heartbeat is a father’s love colliding with inherited trauma that couldn’t be contained in verses and choruses.

Its heartbeat was something more profound than any melody he had written before: it was the unspoken bond of a father’s love, tangled with the weight of inherited trauma. This legacy couldn’t be contained in verses and choruses. The layers of the story unfolded slowly, each one revealing a new truth that demanded patience. It wasn’t about fitting into a song structure anymore. It was about exploring the vastness of emotion and history, letting the characters breathe and evolve in ways that were impossible within the limitations of a three-minute song. For the first time, Dave found himself not just telling a story, but giving it the space to become something larger, something more intricate than he could have ever anticipated.

“Songs teach you rhythm,” Dave explains. “Not just in music, but in words.”
He approached prose like music:

• Sentences became measures of rhythm.
• Dialogue carried rests like a score.
• Panic shortened the lines.
• Clarity smoothed them into flowing chords.

Characters as Lyrics

For Dave, developing characters wasn’t so different from writing lyrics. “In a song, you have moments to show who someone is, a gesture, a detail, a line they won’t cross. A novel gives you hundreds of pages, but the goal’s the same: make them feel true.”

Allan Isaac, the novel’s protagonist, emerged gradually note by note. Wrestling with family addiction, dark humor, and fractured reality, Allan’s desperate sketches of his imaginary daughter gave life to a story that was both surreal and deeply human.

Why Lilly Had to Be a Novel

Some stories simply demand the expanse of a novel. Dave believes Lilly is one of them. “Songs capture moments, a feeling, a single turning point. But Lilly is about the unraveling of a man’s entire world. It’s about the terrifying question: What if the one thing you created to fix your life… breaks it instead?”

The themes are deeply personal. Dave’s own family faced struggles with addiction and mental illness. Yet Lilly doesn’t sink into despair. Like a minor-key ballad that still finds light, the novel blends surreal humor with raw honesty showing how even in darkness, connection is worth fighting for.

Following the Spark

Writing Lilly revealed a new side of Dave’s creativity. Songs, he says, are intimate conversations. Novels are sprawling landscapes. But both begin the same way: with listening.

“You listen for the spark,” he says. “A line. A character’s voice. A feeling that demands expression. Sometimes it arrives as a guitar riff. Sometimes it arrives as a man staring at a sketch that has just become his daughter. Your job is to follow it, wherever it leads.”

A Debut with Heart and Rhythm

Dave Pomfret followed Lilly from melody to manuscript, crafting a debut novel that pulses with rhythm, heart, and the haunting power of a story that refuses to stay silent.

Lilly is available now on Amazon and at online bookstores everywhere.