These Are A Few Of My Favourite Things: Writing Music!

 

Mostly I talk about books and movies, stuff that inspires, delights, and makes me think. But I’ve hitherto neglected to mention in this series the music that inspires and delights me. So today I’m concentrating on my writing music–aka, music I listen to as I write my books–which is why you guys get a video (or three).

I listen to a few different artists as I write, with the most frequently listened-to being Lindsay Stirling, The Piano Guys, and Evanescence. I also like to listen to Nightwish, Within Temptation, and a range of movie soundtracks with wonderful music. Lately, I’ve also purchased a CD of New Orleans music with a dixie/jazz type of sound to it. Listening to music as I write can improve my productivity by up to 100%: I’m far more likely to write 3-6k on a day that I play music as I write, than on a day where I write in silence or with the TV in the back ground. Mind you, The A-Team is great to write to as well, but I do get distracted by the flamin’ awesomeness of Murdock sometimes…

Well, NaNoWriMo is still going, and I still have words to write, so it’s ciao for now! What are you guys listening to as you read/write?

  1. I went through a period of writing to classical music because it had no lyrics to distract me. The Well-Tempered Clavier was pretty awesome for that (4.5 hours of productivity? Yes, please!). I bought 100 Hits of Vivaldi and 100 Hits of Bach off of Amazon for cheap and made a playlist of the pair of them, which I adore for writing. Those Baroques make my keystrokes so much more precise.

    However, my NaNoWriMo novel for this year is in a set of books that I’ve given a theme song: “Bad Sun” by The Bravery (the Sun version, not the Moon version), so I’ve got that in a playlist for this go ’round. I love its peppy motif. (It’s nestled among some VNV Nation, Lifehouse, Paramore, and a smidge of Martin Solveig because this book is supposed to have a more apocalyptic feel to it. Not that Martin Solveig is apocalyptic, haha.)

    I’ve found, most importantly, that I have to already know the music I’m writing to or else I get distracted. So, Pandora’s not the greatest choice for me because it’s always introducing shiny new songs. And there are certain songs I’ve learned just to omit from the playlist or accept that I’m going to stop and rock out to them. Vivaldi’s Summer (the Allegro) is one, when it gets to that really frenzied part. Yeah. I’m hardcore. 😀

    • Vivaldi is good too 🙂 And I do agree about familiarity: it means I don’t get distracted by the music, though it still soothes me. I have a couple songs in my playlist (I use Youtube and stream channels of my favourite artists) that I HAVE to stop and sing to, but I regard those as mini-breaks and absolutely necessary for greater productivity 😀
      Well, it looks like I now have some new artists to check out…

      As for hardcore…yeah, about as hardcore as me sniffling along to Tubby the Tuba 😀

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