Craft of Writing: Building a Playlist of Music for Worldbuilding.

 Dear Reader,

Music can be a powerful muse. I have multiple playlists and different albums I listen to depending on what projects I am working on. This one, for example, was for my NaNoWriMo projects last year. When I am in a position where I am stuck on a scene, I go to music to figure out how to get out of the corner I have painted myself into. Sometimes the lyrics are helpful. Often it is the atmosphere of the music that gets my creative juices going. 

I tend to recycle playlists when I am working on multiple books of the same theme. It helps to keep the undercurrent of the stories the same. At the same time, music can prove a distraction from writing. This is why it is important to carefully curate your playlist and album collection to be tailored towards your work. After all, most people would probably find The Prodigy difficult to reconcile with writing medieval fantasy. While I find their work highly inspiring for science fiction, it is too distracting for writing work that is set in a a medieval fantasy setting.

My goal in building playlists is to create a musical version of the world that I am working in. Some of it lends itself to scenes and the tracks get played on repeat for however long it takes to write the scene. Some of it just lends itself to a sense of what the characters would be hearing in their setting, like at a tavern or at a cloister. In either case, the music helps set the tone of my writing session and lends me a bit of inspiration when I get stuck. I build playlists when I am not writing but thinking about the work that I am going to be handling later on in the day/week.

This is as much a part of my writing process as keeping a notebook where I write down snippets of dialogue that will be used in scenes later and I put down drafts of scenes. I have taken to writing down what musical inspiration has helped me with the science fiction that I've slapped up here to help give you a peek into my writing process. What inspires me to write a scene, however, may not work for you. You might look at the story of Angel and say, "This needs some classical music." That's entirely up to how you interpret what I've put on the page. That's the beautiful thing about music and writing. You can mix and match the genres to come up with your own experience and create your own version of the scene.