I like to listen to music when I write. I think I may have started the habit when my kids were young and the space inside of a pair of headphones was the only solitude I was going to find. Over time, music has become a trigger. The right piece of music can put me back into the required headspace for being creative faster than anything else. A good cup of coffee helps. And my fiancee gave me this candle that smells like bromine, the cleaning agent that Disney uses in the water in all of its attractions, which instantly transports me to my happy place. But it is the music that gets my fingers moving on the keys and keeps them moving.
I typically listen to music without lyrics because my word-obsessed brain will often start listening to the lyrics instead of working. That means I listen to a lot of classical music and a lot of film scores. During the writing of “The Elect Stories,” I most frequently turned to Ennio Morricone’s score to the 1985 film “The Mission,” and Patrick Doyle’s score to the 1994 film, “Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein,” as well as David Byrne’s orchestral album, “The Forest.” There are, however, certain songs whose lyrics will haunt me over the weeks and months of writing and editing a chapter. Often a song will become associated with one of the characters or with a scene, and hearing that song puts me right in that moment or drops me into the character’s perspective. I won’t listen to these songs when I am actively writing, but when I am thinking about writing. Daydreaming. These songs accumulate into an imaginary soundtrack of sorts. Wanna listen?
