Nano Log: Strike a Match with Music

Whether your goal as a writer is to teach, to inspire, or to entertain, there’s a good chance—especially if you’re writing fiction—that you’re trying to ignite a fire within your reader. You want to intellectually and emotionally move each person who reads your work.

But creating this fire requires an initial spark of inspiration. Finding this can be one of the hardest parts of writing, whatever kind of project you’re working on.

Too many people wait for inspiration to strike them like a bolt of lightning. The problem with this is that it’s unreliable, unpredictable, and unsustainable. You’re unlikely to be struck, you’re less likely to be struck often, and if you are struck, the results aren’t always what you’d hoped for. Try managing the fire that results from that mess.

Inspiration, contrary to popular myth, is something that writers have to create for themselves. If we waited for these sparks to happen on their own, we’d rarely have anything to write. So instead of standing in the rain with a lightning rod, we go back inside and search the drawers for a matchbox.

For a lot of us, that matchbox is actually music. Listening to music as we write is one way that we can use to light a fire and keep it going. It doesn’t guarantee us the next great American novel, because pretty much nothing does. It does, however, make it easier to write when we take the power away from the unpredictable elements and start the fire ourselves.

This one tool, it turns out, is different for many writers who use is.

We choose our music differently. Some of us prefer songs without words or written in languages we don’t understand. This makes it easier to concentrate on the words that we’re writing and keeps us from being distracted by the desire to sing along to a catchy song. This is what I’ll usually do, depending on what I’m working on.

Sometimes we like to pick songs based on genre or personal preference. Whether we tend to listen to country or electronic or pop, that’s what we choose when they’re writing.

Other writers will choose their music based on song lyrics. They pick things with lines that connect somehow to their plot or characters. Since discovering musician Dalton Rapattoni, I’ve found that a couple of his songs really speak to the main character of my current work-in-progress.

How do you choose your music? Do you find lyrics distracting or inspiring? Do you stick with whatever genres you usually listen to?

We organize our music differently. Some of us will categorize music by mood, meaning that we have a different list to choose from for whatever emotion we’re trying to convey. This can be characters’ moods or the overall mood of a scene. Something with a racing beat, for example, for a chase scene or something dark and sad for the character battling depression.

We can also organize our music by character or project. You could create a playlist meant to represent a character or even an entire project.

So how do you prefer to sort your writing music? Do you have playlists of sad music, happy music, etc.? Or do you have lists that relate to characters or stories? I personally do both.

We use our music differently. Some authors prefer to manually switch from song to song as they write. If you know what you want to listen to and when you want to listen, this method may be right for you. Working off of a playlist isn’t for everyone.

Some like to listen to a specific song or playlist on repeat. I think I’d go crazy doing this, but if there’s a single piece or collection of music that creates the spark for you, then listening to it constantly may be the best way to keep your fire lit.

Some writers, including me, prefer to create a “smart” playlist. Using music apps like Pandora (my personal preference) you can put together a list of songs and then sit back as the algorithms suggest others that may appeal to you. Pandora learns pretty quickly what I like to listen to on each of my stations and saves me the time of having to manually collect songs. And I also stumble across perfect songs for my lists, often songs that I hadn’t known before.

How do you listen? Do you put together a list, listen to one song at a time, or let a program select songs for you?

Chasing lighting isn’t the most reliable way to get your fire going strong. But by strategically including music in your writing process, you can strike a match whenever you want and create a flame that you can control.

If you like to listen to music as you write, do you use any of the methods that I’ve mentioned for collecting, organizing, and using your writing music? Or do you have your own system that I didn’t touch on? Let me know in the comments below!