A magic beyond all we do here

[prillalar]

Tonight I got out the Sarah McLachlan again. I keep Fumbling Towards Ecstasy around for writing purposes. I often like to have a soundtrack for a story and Sarah is great for sappy fic. Usually she's just for hobbits, but this is for something else. I'd originally tried Sinatra for this piece, but the tone wasn't quite right. Sarah will get the job done.

I find that picking a CD or a playlist helps me to get into the mood of the story when I sit down to write. I think I listened to O Fortuna about a hundred times over one SW story.

I used to do that when I was in uni too. One semester, I stupidly took three Greek classes and one Latin class so I spent nearly every waking moment doing translation. (I think I did get a bit of fic written too.) I work better early than late, so I'd get up at about 6 AM, make tea, put on some Gregorian chants and get to work.

Then one morning, I realised that I'd forgotten to turn on the CD and what I'd thought were chants was really the wind moaning.

Do you pick music to write to? I don't have to have a soundtrack for every story, but some certainly go a lot better when I do.

Just so long as I don't start writing song stories...

Comments

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

I can't write if there's music playing. I can't do any sort of useful mental work if there's music playing. Even instrumental music. It distracts me too much.

[sophia-helix.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I try to match a song or three to a story, and use them to get me back into the writing mood by association ("Okay, That Song is playing now, must be writing Ganya to go with it").

I did once set a playlist for a certain story (Tom Waits' "The Heart of Saturday Night") and played it so very incessantly, even though I was dead tired of hearing it, that when I finally switched over to some Loreena McKennit for the home stretch, my brain suddenly got this enormous creative surge and wrote this ending that everyone likes and I scarcely remember having written. Good times, though. *g*

.m

[realitycek.livejournal.com]

I've always been one of those "the whole world has a soundtrack" sorts, so music is a pretty important component. I do tend to have songs or playlists for stories, as well as for regular characters; usually, however, it's stuff I've run across and been struck by, rather than actively hunted down for the purpose. It interests me how often The Perfect Thing is what would seem at first glance to be the most incongruous, and/or done by an artist one would never think of if one were deliberately looking.

Not counting things like Lyric Wheels, I can think of only two pieces I've ever done in my life that could possibly be called songfics. And even then, it was more that the music was a framework or an inspiration -- not something that actually appeared in (or could be inferred from) the story in any way.