Music and Writing

(Note: I'm going up to the Lake District this weekend, where I will have no internet, which will be great for me, but not so great for the blog. Expect to hear all about what I learned about writing on Monday)

This one is more a curious question to any other writers who might be reading the blog--do you listen to music when you write? What about when you brainstorm? Are you reliant upon it to do either?

Personally, I tend to listen to music when I do both, but when I'm writing it's absolutely not necessary, and I often find that whole CDs of music have gone by without me noticing when I'm really in the flow of things. When I'm brainstorming, however, music is often key.

I can brainstorm in the middle of the night without music just fine--insomnia is sort of the other great trigger of my imagination, or maybe it's the other way around, I can never tell. But if I'm awake I get distracted without music to keep me focused on the stories I'm crafting. Most of the brainstorming for my first novel was done on the school bus going back and forth between my house and my high school. A lot of the rest was done while running with music on.

Often I find that albums tend to define my novels for me. For instance, I plotted out each of the novels in the trilogy I'm currently working on while listening to a different Linkin Park album. Those of you who were around know how incredibly excited I got when I found out they were releasing their third album, because I'd been having a devil of time trying to plot my third novel and I just knew somehow that that CD would give me something to work off of. Sure enough, it did, and it took me to scenes I never expected to include, but that will really help tie off the story arcs of some of the characters. And the idea for my fourth novel was actually launched by the Three Days Grace song "Never Too Late," (much sooner than I expected and, to be honest, sooner than I'd hoped---I won't get to it for years) and specifically the line "Even if I say it'll be alright still I hear you say you want to end your life"--which just so perfectly encapsulated the problem that one of my main characters was going to face after the end of the aforementioned trilogy and immediately gave me the catalyst I needed to figure out how to wrap up his story. When I bought the album with that song on it, I was able to plot out that novel within a few days.

Anyway, this is getting a bit rambly, but my point is that for me, at any rate, music is a huge part of my creative process, and I'm curious whether it's as important for others---and which bands and albums in particular have launched novels for people, because I'd love to give them a listen---you can never have too many good ideas. :-)