Music. I wouldn’t say I’m the biggest music fan – I don’t listen to the radio (in fact, the radio in my car is broke), or buy a lot of albums. I couldn’t tell you who’s who on the music scene these days. I do a little better with music from the 80’s and 90’s – but truth is, that’s partly because at this point it’s over 20 years old, so I’ve had a little time to learn who sang what. Well, some of it.
And yet, in my advancing age (who has a birthday in less than four weeks? This guy.), I find that working in silence is stilting and suffocating. It has to be the right music, though, not just something random. For example, if its work for the office, it tends to be 80 and 90’s “rock.” Familiar tunes with beats and words I already know. Writing, too, has its own orchestration. I’m not one of those people who has a soundtrack for his current magnum opus, but what I do have is pretty close.
What I have Pandora.
Pandora doesn’t let you choose all of the music you listen to – you seed a station with artists/albums/songs, you guide its evolution with approvals and disprovals, but in a lot of ways its random like a real radio station, except with a very focussed music set (and without commercials if you pay for the service). Pandora is possible because music producers hope you’ll like something enough to buy it after listening to it on Pandora, and I have to admit that thanks to Pandora, I have bought a few new albums. I don’t know if I could do some of my writing without my collection of Bear McCreary albums – I have just about his complete collection of BSG soundtracks, and while it’s a little repetitive in places overall it provides that perfect staccato beat that forces my fingers to try to keep up with it on the keyboard until I have pages of text just rolling from brain to screen. But as you can see from the screenshot of my Pandora list on the right (or wherever it appears if you’re reading this in RSS), I’ve got a lot of variations on a theme going on. I prefer my music to be as wordless as possible, for example, and depending on my mood, either rife with drums, or violins, or both. Pandora gives me all of this, playing related music to my whim, and all for $30 a year (cheaper than if I tried to compile all of this music myself).
So why this post on what should be writerly Wednesday, other than the fact that the day almost burned me out without my getting a chance to post anything? I’m glad you asked.
Pandora – or rather, music in general – is what deserves the credit in my recent resurgence of writing. Sure, maybe it was just the winter doldrums, but for the last few months most of the music I’ve listened to has been what you might call “wordy,” which is to say, it had lyrics. No great crime there, but when you get most of your writing ideas while daydreaming, it helps if you don’t have someone else’s words distracting you. (I almost said while driving to and from work, but then you’d have all kinds of questions, like why am I daydreaming when I should be 100% focussed on the road for an hour, or how can I hear music if my radio is broken. Life is full of questions like these, and I encourage you to think about them and write a piece of flash fiction that explains it. There. Writing lesson for the day delivered.) In the last week or so, I’ve dusted off some of my Pandora stations and really started tuning them (the David Garret station is my current project feed – think rock beats with orchestral instruments and no lyrics and you’re most of the way there).
Has it helped me?
I think so. Burgeoning in my brain right now is an entire series of books and related short stories, all of them screaming for notes to be taken and details to be worked out, plots to be outlined, tales to be told, and the fate of an empire, no a species, no the UNIVERSE is at stake. That’s my idea of escalation. Its up to me to now sort through it all and make some sense of it, make sure none of it conflicts too much at this stage, and then start fleshing out the stories. But they are coming.
And its all thanks to the music.
