Music is a truly amazing thing. It can move people to tears, melt the hardest of hearts and bring a smile to your face when you’re feeling at your worst. It also has benefits that can be more personal to you – for instance, I find it very hard to write if I don’t have music on. However, it has to be instrumentals, or classical/acoustic. I can’t write to many songs with words – pop songs, rock songs etc are all out of the question. The only two songs with lyrics that I have on my writing playlist right now are an acoustic version of “Cancer” by My Chemical Romance, and “Who Wants To Live Forever”, the Katherine Jenkins version of the Queen classic.
I’m not sure what it is about the lyrics – perhaps that I find myself wanting to sing along, and that distracts me from actually doing any productive writing – but I really struggle to write if the music I listen to has any fast-paced lyrics. I mainly use “soundtrack” music – I believe the correct term is “epic score” or something similar. I find the best two groups for this are Two Steps From Hell and Immediate Music – both of these groups have such a variety of pieces available (I say “pieces” rather than “songs” because they are – they are beautifully orchestrated and incredibly emotional. You can get pieces that range from mind-blowingly epic to heartbreakingly emotional and tear-jerking, and my Writing playlist is full of their pieces.
Personally, I find it easier to write with the emotional music – when it’s epic, I often find myself having to sit back and actually losing myself in the music, and I picture epic battle scenes that usually don’t actually fit with where I am in the story at the moment – because it seems to enhance my writing somehow. If I’m writing a particularly sad scene, I will find one piece, which I feel best represents the emotions I’m trying to show in the scene, and I will listen to it on repeat constantly until I’ve finished the chapter. There are some chapters, like the epic long one in this book, where I actually have a smaller playlist playing on loop to write it, because the characters are experiencing such a plethora of emotions, and I want all the different pieces on hand to help me to write it. It seems to work pretty well – I’m so proud of that chapter I wrote, and I’m convinced the music I chose played a definite part in it.
There are some people who can’t write to music, but they find that music helps them to picture scenes in their heads, and even helps them to come up with new scenes – one of the Immediate Music pieces, “Boy Wonder”, basically gave me the whole scene in my head of the first chapter of what will be the sequel to the trilogy I’m currently writing, and that all came from around two minutes of music – just two minutes of noise, but it’s some of the most beautiful and most inspiring “noise” I have ever heard.
So, if you’re ever struggling for a plot, or the words just don’t want to flow, slip on your headphones (or better yet, play it out loud if you don’t have to be considerate of neighbours!), go to YouTube and find some of this epic score music – search for Two Steps From Hell or Immediate Music, listen to a few of their pieces and then see what the Recommendations bar down the side of the video suggests to you – you might just find a new piece of music that gets your story back on track!
the life of a moomin 