While Writing, Music

Writing is hard at the best of times. At the worst of times, it’s close to impossible.

Planning is important, and that takes up an entire article to talk about and not something I particularly want to talk about now.

Character Breakdowns, where every single aspect of each main character is dissected and examined by the writer to make each and everything done and said by the character to make sense in his/her psych profile. Also, not something I want to talk about right now.

Other than all this planning, there is a very simple solution to making writing seem less time consuming and much easier to get into.

The solution is music. Now, I’m not talking about the hard rock or weepy classical. I’m talking about the music that suits you best.

What I’ve found that is the best for writing is music without lyrics. Lyrics tend to stick ideas into your brain and this translates onto the page pretty subconsciously. For instance, while writing the second and third paragraphs of this article, I was listening to “Right Here, Right Now” by Fatboy Slim. Check out the the few words in the paragraphs and you’ll get why wordless music is kinda important.

Subconscious writing can be very dangerous for the simple fact that through writing a passage of dialogue between two people whilst listening to Lady GaGa may result in very poker-faced dialogue from two character who end up talking exactly like one another.

Music with out lyrics allows you to think, while still stimulating your brainwaves to think about what to write.

Funnily, I was going to start recommending something like iTunes Genius to do this for you, but one has to try out the product before they start recommending it to people and it turns out that Genius is crap, always experiencing technical difficulties and impossible to find any support over on the internet. Thus, I sent a strongly-worded complaint to the iTunes support department, which I imagine will be filtered by some Automator process into a directory entitled “Complaints for Steve to laugh at when he’s feeling depressed about his cancerous cells”.

Before trying Genius, I used (and since Genius is crap, still continue to use) playlists. A nice, few hours long playlist exists in my iTunes entitled “music to write with”. I stick it on shuffle within the playlist, so that I’m not always listening to the same sequences of music and write away.

My playlist consists almost entirely of Soundtrack music, but not entirely. It includes:

• “Latika’s Theme” and “Millionaire” from the Slumdog Millionaire OST
• A few tracks from the Vier Minuten OST
• Loads of instrumental crap from Pirates of the Caribbean OSTs
• The entire soundtrack of A Clockwork Orange with the omission of “Lighthouse Keeper” (makes me stop writing every time) and “Singing in the Rain”
• Many tracks from the Stardust OST
• Chronicles of Narnia OSTs
• “LemonJelly.KY” and “Lost Horizons” by Lemon Jelly (funnily the mixing in of lyrics doesn’t effect me)
• “Trouser Jazz” from Mr. Scruff
• A few tracks from the Trainspotting OST
• 2001: A Space Odyssey OST
• A couple of slices from the OST of Finding Nemo
• Bits out of the LOTR OSTs

That’s pretty much my playlist itemised. Every song in there stimulates my brain to start writing. I stick it on shuffle so that I’ll never know what’s coming next and I could write all day with that list on repeat. It’s fantastic.

One of the great things about OSTs is that you will subconsciously refer a piece of music from an OST to the particular actions and emotions emitted in the film when that piece was playing. So, when you’re writing a sequence of intense sexual energy, for instance, maybe it would be easier to listen to the “William Tell Overture” from the A Clockwork Orange soundtrack. Maybe, if you’re writing something about unrequited love, you might be better off listening to “Here with Me” from Dido on the Love Actually soundtrack or perhaps “Twilight and Shadow” from the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King soundtrack.

These are just suggestions, of course. When it comes to writing with music, everybody has their preferences. I wish I could write while I was listening to Green Day or Aerosmith, but the lyrics just distract me. It’s hard enough with Lemon Jelly, however, they’re just about melodic enough that you can ignore the lyrics you hear every so often and just work with the song. When it comes to others, they could never listen to “His Majesty King Raam” while writing, but be perfectly at home with “Permanent Vacation”.

It’s all a matter of preference, but if you find that your writing is slow without music, or that the music you’re using is slowing you down, get a couple of the albums I have up there.

I’d be surprised if they did you absolutely no good whatsoever.