Hello! Just a quick note…I’ll be on holiday next week (yippee!) so there will not be a blog post on August 9, but I’ll be back on the 16th!
So today’s post came to me while I was listening to Crystallize by Lindsey Stirling. As a violinist, I find her talent just mind-boggling. How can she play at such an elite level…and dance at the same time, like a court fiddler of olde? Crazy.
Anyway, music’s a big part of my life (I’ve written about this several times before) but I want to take a different track today: Visualization. For me, music isn’t just something in the background to soothe my muse while I write. It’s a scene setter. A character developer. A plot outliner. I do some of my best “writing” in the car. Why? Because when it’s just me and my stereo, humming down the highway, I can “see” scenes better that way than when I’m faced with a blank page. I frequently write in my head before it spills into the manuscript. A kind of weird way to do it, I guess, but I often see the story as a movie, then scramble to put it on paper.
Music is often the catalyst for those scenes. I have a vague idea of what I need, but a certain song(s) (lately it’s New Divide by Linkin Park, Brave by Sara Bareilles and Kill Your Heroes by AWOLNTION) can launch a train of thought that allows me to develop an entire plot point in the time it takes me to drive from home to work. What I normally do then is listen to that song at least once during the day (usually at lunch, so I can jot down a note or two), then again on the way home, nailing down parts of the scene that were fuzzy. Then that evening, after dinner and family time, I crank up the iPod one more time and madly type the pictures in my head.
For that reason, music is intrinsically linked with writing for me–words/melody/lyric. My muse probably tormented a conductor in a former life…that’s the only thing that makes sense. If I’m working on an emotionally charged scene, I need emotionally charged tunes. Last week when I talked about killing a character? I listened to Skyfall by Adele while writing that scene. It came in the middle of this multi-chapter fight scene, so I was switching between Linkin Park and Evanescence for this mournful, melancholy song and back again. Small wonder I was in a state for a few days. But that was the only way I could switch from “badass” to “heartbroken” in the middle.
Anybody else live and breathe with a soundtrack in your head? Writers…music in the background, or absolutely silence?
Have a great couple of weeks! I’ll see you on the flip side, hopefully tan and relaxed (and having slammed a ton of words on the page). Until then!
This entry was posted in Blog on August 2, 2013 by Kendra.
Girl, we are SO much alike. That’s exactly the way it works for me. Music brings the scene to life and I can see it unfolding in my head. I get it all: character interactions, dialogue, setting. I really struggle when I have to write a scene that I haven’t envisioned this way.
I’m the same as you. Every time I try to write something I have to listen to a song first. My best work comes to me in the car or just relaxing to some music. I think there are a lot of writers out there like us.