If you talk to writers, most will tell you that they like to listen to music while they write. I am no exception to that rule. Before I open a document to work on, I make my choice of music to listen to while I write. I have a lot of different selections – both on streaming services and on something called a CD, which some of you may be familiar with – to choose from, most curated and organized by me, some created by others. I only really have one rule – no lyrics, nothing I can sing along with. The purpose of the music is to minimize distractions, and I can guarantee that I will not be very productive if I put on anything I can sing along with. My music of choice when writing is soundtracks from movies and television shows; there is a tremendous range, no vocals (some do; I omit these songs from my playlists) and they usually include several hours of music, making them perfect for me. When I refer to soundtracks, I am referring to the underscore – the non-diegetic instrumental music that accompanies a film.
There is only one soundtrack that I cannot use (at least so far): the John Williams underscore to the Star Wars films. Having grown up listening to that music and as a big fan of those movies, I simply cannot resist humming or drumming or out-and-out singing along with the notes. This does not include the music from the Star Wars shows. In fact, the music from The Mandalorian, composed by Ludwig Göransson (who just won a Golden Globe for Oppenheimer; I will have to add some of that to my playlists), is one of my playlists for writing. He is a wonderful composer with an eclectic and varied range of styles.
When I was younger, I assembled playlists based upon the type of story or scene I was working on, trying to put my writing mind into a specific mood or to try and achieve a certain tempo with my words. I had some success with that, but it was very time-consuming to search for and collect the different songs for different pieces. It would take me hours, time better spent writing, to select the best music for what I wanted to accomplish.
That is not to say that the music I choose does not impact my work. There have been many times where the rhythm of a song influenced the structure and tempo of a specific scene, sometimes even just one or two sentences. Part of my style is to craft long, compound sentences, and though I have been trying to rein them in I sometimes find myself stringing together convoluted collections of ideas and devices into a five-line-long sentence. Music, especially pieces with a tighter, more staccato rhythm, works its way into my stories occasionally. If you are reading something of mine and see sections with short, direct prose, that was most likely influenced by what I was listening to at the time.
And I do, from time to time, make choices based upon what I am working on. For example, when I was writing This Is Not Happening for volume one of We Suck at Comics, I was listening to a lot of music from Mark Snow’s score to The X-Files. Beyond the genre of the show, it had a very synth, avant-garde, electronic sound that really fit well with the story (which, of course, was in part influenced by that show). That doesn’t mean I will be listening to the Lord of the Rings score when I write fantasy – though the music Howard Shore created for those films is another of my playlists, again omitting some tracks with vocals – but if I find that I have a particularly productive day of writing, when I approach that story again I will often return to the same music as well.
I’ve mentioned several of my favorite composers to listen to while writing throughout this post. There are many others – from Bernard Herrmann to Michael Kamen to Alan Silvestri – but I don’t want this post to get too long. I’ll probably write a few other posts about specific collections of music. Feel free to add some suggestions in the comments.