The power of music!

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!

My Story…

No, this isn’t another blabbering session about myself and my past. Well, it does concern me, but it’s not ABOUT me – it’s about the story I’m writing, the one I’ll probably mention quite a lot. I don’t want to give too much away because of plagiarism – I’ve met a few plagiarists in my time and they have no morals or a sense of individuality, they just crave attention and praise that they’re not talented enough to get for themselves.

I might post a few chapter when it’s all done, dusted and edited (the first book that is, I’m not going to make you wait until I’ve finished the whole trilogy), but I’m really not sure if it’s any good – I’ve been reading it back and it all seems a bit samey, so I’m toying with the idea of starting again. The only problem is, I got that idea from a dream, and I haven’t had any dreams that could be made into anything but a horror story/hallucination recently, so looks like I’m stuck trying to improve it and add in a few more exciting characters/bits of character development before I go any further. To be honest, I should probably have started planning BEFORE I started writing, rather than the other way around – but there we go. I doubt it’ll ever get published, but I’m still wary of posting too much detail about it, in case it gets stolen.

Basically, it’s a fantasy. And it concerns the afterlife. And the concept that our soul lives on when our body ceases to function. And that’s all I’m going to tell you 😉

I like writing fantasy. I can get away with a lot when I’m writing fantasy because if people say “That would never happen”, I can reply, “Maybe not in our world – but in my story’s world, it most certainly does!”. I don’t set much store by reality in my stories, because it bogs you down – you get so focused on looking at the possibility/probability of this or that happening, and you end up getting confused and then bored of having to do all this research – trust me, I’ve been there! I much prefer to write about a fantasy world, where I can make up the rules and then all I have to do is make sure I’m following my rules – if that makes sense.

I tend to jump between stories – I’ll write loads of one (my NaNoWriMo 2011 effort being an example, I got to around 60,000 words during NaNo, got tendonitis, got bored and stopped writing it), then I’ll get bored, start writing another, wish I hadn’t stopped writing the first one but by that point I’ve gotten so into the second one that it’s hard to get used to writing in the world of the first one again! It’s even harder considering my NaNo was more of a science-fiction, this one is more in the realms of fantasy really.

I’m quite excited for where the story is going in the second book, but in the third… not so much, which is a shame because I want to be excited. I’m quite tempted to just go for a completely different angle in the third one – introduce a whole new villain or something. Or even, potentially, turn one of the good characters from the first two into a villain. I’m just kind of typing as I’m thinking here so that I don’t lose the idea, so this might happen… but it might not.

Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief foray into what I’m actually writing, so that when you read my rants about word counts/characters not doing what I want them to/the fact that I REALLY SUCK at descriptions, you’ll understand.