Music and Your Writing

“We can’t afford to be innocent.  Stand up and face the enemy.  It’s a do or die situation.  We will be invincible.”  (Pat Benatar) I can hear these words playing in my head over and over.  The melody of the song catches in my chest and I begin to hum.  My head lowers, chin to chest; my eyes narrow and I feel my vision sharpen.  This is when the magic happens.  The humming reverberates throughout my body: into my belly, down my arms and into my fingers.  I blink and when my eyes open I have been transported into another world.  It is not one that is unfamiliar; no, I know exactly where I am.  As I walk, a scratchy radio above me bleats out the song playing in my head.

I am now completely immersed in my world.  I can hear the sounds of cars whizzing past me, women chatting on the street next to me, and the sounds of industrial machines in the distance.  But over the sounds of the city, past the faces of the people that are looking through me, I hear the melody of the song.

Like myself, some of you use music to help immerse yourself into a particular scene, absorb the rhythm and let it flow into your writing, or perhaps simply to cover the screaming of the small children in the next room.  I have heard tales of writers that change their genre of music based on the particular chapter or scene they are writing.  For example, they play opera for a romance scene or death metal for an especially violent part in their story.  Among many others, Stephen King has stated that he listens to the band Metallica when he writes.  Who knows how his stories would change if the music did.

To get my writing mojo going, I like 80s pop ‘fight’ songs as I call them.  So much of my fiction writing is based on anti-government, anti-society, and revolutionary thought and there are quite a few songs in that genre that play into the emotion I want to tap into for my story.  I pull a song up, close my eyes, transport my psyche, and unleash my fingers.  Sometime after the first part of my scene, the music runs out or gets turned off and I just keep going.  At worst, a sprint of words is conceived; at best, a chapter or new story line is born.

Incorporating music can be beneficial to creating mood and rhythm, but it can also be a slippery slope.  I come across a song that I think will help jump start my writing and I jot it down in the margins of my notebook so I can come back to it later.  We don’t want to fall into the vicious cycle of overly researching something that should be secondary and taking up the time that is necessary for writing.  If you aren’t sure, listen to some music one day while preparing dinner or getting ready for work.  Take a mental note on how it makes you feel and if it would make your character feel the same way or if it is something that you could see playing on the radio in place where your characters live, work, and die.  Do the words or melody invoke feelings of love, heartache, playfulness, or desperation?

These emotions can be used to inspire or motivate you.  But wait…there’s more.  Just because you may be listening to death metal, for example, it doesn’t mean that your scene will automatically be one of immense violence and death.  Music can be used as a type of metronome as well.  Rhythm is a base in music, poetry, and most other forms of writing.  It helps the pace along, giving it momentum to move forward.  The beat is what marches our stories on at a steady, even pace until its final conclusion.

Using music to influence your writing, get you in the mood, or pick up the pace is not the only purpose for it.  Use it to spice up your scenes.  Does your victim hear the sound of a radio playing softly in the bedroom next door?  What about a commercial jingle blaring from a television in the window of an empty barber shop?  What about when your character gets in their car and the radio screams when the car gets turned on?

Music is a medium you can use to brighten up (or darken) the painting that is your story, no matter the form you use it in.