Can/do you guys listen to music while writing?
I have always been extremely easily distracted, so most of the time I need this absurd and unrealistic level of peacefulness – perfect silence, nothing going on in the background, feng shui and shit – to study or write or pretty much do anything requiring mental acuity. As you might imagine, that's pretty hard to come by as frequently as I would like.
While visiting with my parents this weekend (who are loud and active by nature), I have ended up having to play a twelve hour loop of blaring white noise on youtube in the evenings to even come close to being able to think without pulling my hair out.
There's a little bit of music I can work with, but for the most part anything but silence just makes me irritable.
I'm with you my friend. When I'm writing I need total silence. Same thing when I'm trying to get to sleep. If I'm having sex I insist the lady is silent even though it's hard for her because I'm such a great lover. If I'm at a restaurant and a man is making a noise while he eats I often walk over and tip the bowl of soup over his head before shoving the bread roll down his throat. I'll never forgive Neil Armstrong for breaking the perfect silence of space with those stupid words.
I'm big on silence.
I love writing to music. I think it's probably a good thing, too--because if I got used to total silence, I'd never write with a toddler, a dog, a vocal cat and a husband in a 900sq ft house.
Here is a somewhat dated list of the BEST POSSIBLE MUSIC IN THE WORLD TO WRITE TO:
Alkaline Trio
Chelsea Grin
Vanna
The Devil Wears Prada
iwrestledabearonce
Ice Cube
Tegan and Sara
Autotune the News
A Day to Remember
Kelly Clarkson
Kesha
Billy Talent
Zao
Strife
Ludacris
Rammstein
Demon Hunter
My Chemical Romance
Fallout Boy
Panic at the Disco
Tenacious D
They Might Be Giants
I Set My Friends On Fire
Nicki Minaj
Lil Wayne
Rent
Wicked
Avenue Q
Spamalot
Rihanna
The Tragically Hip
Peeping Tom
Mr. Bungle
Alesana
Herbie Hancock
Sloan
POS
Dessa
Sims
Millionaires
Cannibal Ox
I can write to music if I don't care about the lyrics. If I am trying to figure them out or have the urge to sing along, I can't write. That being said, I write to music all the time. Sometimes my brain needs the pause of a song or two. There is no such thing as silence. I would love to leave that 'as is' just to drive a couple people crazy, but I will specify. There is no such thing as silence in my head.
Interesting list Jeffrey Grant Barr. I am silently judging you.
I like writing to music without vocals.
That was a hell of a list, JGB. I write to an equally eclectic list. I like fast, crazy punk rock when I need to focus and music that brings out intense emotions when I am writing super-intense stuff. Sometimes it is the music itself that does that, sometimes it is the lyrics. I've been listening to music while doing other stuff since I was ten or eleven though, it only distracts me if it's one of the first few times I've heard a new album.
I mostly write to dark electronic/dance music and indie rock, so most of that is what I listen to when I write. It depends on the story, really. Usually I like to make a small playlists of songs that affect what I'm writing for each story, but if I can't really come up with anything, I throw on some Chilly Gonzales solo piano:
Bek--check out Synthetic Division if you get the chance--you might like them.
I have a playlist sitting at 802 songs, about 6 and a half gigs of music, that I use specifically for writing, studying, or a very bad mood. It's all trip-hop, dark ambient, electronic, drone, space, experimental, what have you. Anything along those lines that features no lyrics. I've got more familiar stuff like NIN's Ghosts I-IV and Reznor/Ross's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo soundtrack (which is really quite excellent), and more obscure stuff like all of Akira Yamaoka's Silent Hill soundtracks (plus the latest from Daniel Licht) and the Silent Hill fan albums from the Broken Notes and Liminality groups. Then I've got even more obscure stuff like Liminal Records groups... Fellirium, Abstracode, Gasgruel, Macabro, Triple Low Pass... and some random other stuff I've found here and there... Floex, The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation. This stuff fits the tone of what I write, generally, and there are no distracting lyrics or overly attention-grabbing guitar riffs/drum loops/whatever.
I do sometimes work to a variety of metal outfits, especially death metal. Cephalic Carnage, Meshuggah, Gorod, whatever else. This is all well and good, and sometimes works fine, but other times I find that I just have to tap with my feet or my fingers to the point where I do that instead of working. So I don't do this as much anymore.
I can't write to music, but sometimes whatever I am listening to will prompt something to write.
I write to Tom Waits when I remember to turn on music. Otherwise, there's the TV in the background.
I wrote a book listening to They Might Be Giants. It isn't a good book, but I did finish it.
A lot of times, I'll listen to music and a phrase will strike me as something I could write about - so music helps me come up with ideas, but I don't listen to it once I start writing.
I have trouble focusing if there's silence because any slight noise will jar me from my focus.
I have the terrible habit of finding one song, honing in on it, and listening to it over and over and over -- and sometimes it isn't songs I'll admit to listening to. I listen to The Blood Brothers when I write horror, old Gym Class Heroes when it's about drugs, and new GCH if it's about enlightenment or transcending. I have a playlist called Nostalgia on Pandora that's all shit that I liked in 2004 to 2008 when I'm writing something that I need to escape emotion for, because I know the music so well that it doesn't affect me.
Pandora is my best friend if I need to escape whatever I'm stuck in -- so if one song gets replayed a thousand times, I'll switch to Pandora so my writing doesn't get boring.
JGB, I got an anxiety attack just reading your list.
Tom Waits might be good, but I usually can't do shit with words. Mostly stuff like this:
Even instrumental music, once I've heard it a few times, I still lock onto it the same way I do with vocal music. So it can't be anything familiar. I'm a musician, and my brain involuntarily switches over to charting the arrangements or chord progressions or whatever.
I've mentioned this in probably a half-dozen different places, but my go-to is Cinemix.us (they're also on iTunes Radio in the Classical category), which is streaming film scores, 95% instrumental.
Chris Deal wrote a four-part series on the topic a few years ago that I enjoyed, called "iTunes and the Pen."
@Wildman666 - Red Sparrowes gets my approval. Your taste is impeccable.
I also tend to go for instrumental stuff whilst writing - Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mono, Esmerine, Bohren and Der Club of Gore - that kind of stuff.
@Bryanhowie - Hugely approve of Tom Waits as a musical choice, but I can't write for shit when he's playing. He's got that whole Halloween carnival feel to much of his music and it starts seeping through into my work. Not always a bad thing, but when I reread it I realise that it probably isn't flowing as well as I thought it did when the music was on.
I can't write to music, I get easily distracted and honestly could barely muster a few words with that distraction. I don't need total silence to write but with any sort of distraction/noise, I usually average at about 500 words/hour. But if I work in total silence and put my mind to it I can take that average up to about 1500/hr.
I've never listened to music while writing except during last year's NaNoWriMo, and even then it was only classical and jazz -- stuff without lyrics. Although I really don't know if the kind of music I listen to regularly would throw me off or not. I wrote this while blasting Bon Jovi and it seems to have turned out alright.
I can write with out music, but I don't like it. I find music keeps my mind from wandering too far off task.
This is the rdio playlist that I listen too now. It has a wide variety of music. Nothing specific spurns me on to write, just music I like.
I love writing to music. It's kind of amazing how what you're listening to can guide the words, and how likewise you can be put in the mood for something based on a scene you're writing. I have the attention span of a three year old with ADD so it also helps me focus (likewise, can hinder me if it's too distracting or off track).
Over half my recent manuscript was written while listening to Muse and the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. It's YA and I found that writing high school romance stuff is greatly enhanced by Coldplay, angst stuff by My Chemical Romance or Fall Out Boy. My fallback music is Radiohead/Thom Yorke, Air, Amanda Palmer, Trail of Dead and The Cure. Nice stuff that's not too interruptive but full of emotion.
One friend writes to nothing but Andrew Bird, and another swears by Teagan and Sara.
Tegan and Sara is good music to write to and just plain good music. Every once in a while, if I'm not feeling it, this song will snap me out of it:
Alkaline Trio with Tegan Quin 'Wake up Exhausted'
Classical, or more atmospheric, less rhythmic stuff; or, if rhythmic, more drone-y or minimalist. Whatever non-catchy, non-bombastic stuff, usually without lyrics. Mostly I don't write to music unless I know exactly what I'm doing. If I have a perfectly clear idea of what I'm writing about, I won't be distracted.
Bumping because you must know.
Pandora -> Azam Ali -> Enter
I have no idea what kind of music this is, but it's a favorite of mine.
I really like to listen to music with non-English lyrics. Something about having that human voice, but not being able to really understand it, keeps me in a more focused headspace than purely instrumental music. It's like the comforting background noise of a TV, but I don't find myself becoming sucked in since I ultimately have nothing to latch onto.
Right now it varies between mellow late period Einsturzende Neubauten and more droning black metal, depending on what I'm trying to write.
I just read something the other week talking about this. Here it is, George Saunders on writing to music;
I never listen to music when I write. I always felt that it had the effect of creating artificial wings for your prose. Like, if you listen to Stand Up and Be Strong by Soul Asylum, while reading your prose, it will always sound uplifting. Even the phonebook reads as uplifting when you listen to that song.
Which is a good point.
I usually have the TV on, basketball, or Magnum P.I. or King of the Hill; something I've seen a hundred times/doesn't matter. Music only really works for me at certain points in writing. I listen to a bunch during the pre-writing other stuff time, during a draft I'll only really put it on when I'm super antsy, anxious, tired of being at the computer, I'll put something on for a couple minutes or a whole record, by the time it's silent again I'm usually well into it or, if not, it's time to do something else for a little bit. Only iTunes, never vinyl. Most often stuff with lyrics or really intricate melodies, stuff I'm so familiar with that I almost don't care about it anymore. Sometimes the most aurally abrasive stuff. Mostly though just pop. 80's pop.
Frank Sinatra.
I disagree with Saunders. While music can affect perception, it can also work in opposition to it. That is to say, the feeling it produces can be inappropriate to or contrary to feelings produced by other stimuli or thoughts, such as those produced by words on a page. (This friction itself can be seen as yet another feeling.) His statement sounds to me like he's really just saying he likes that song a lot, and isn't speaking significantly about music on the whole.
Films rely on this manipulation often, like a ballet score under a John Woo shootout.
Maybe Saunders meant that he didn't want those associations permanently linked for himself as its creator and rereader, the same way hearing Bon Jovi can't not remind you of unhooking your first bra in the dark, or that "Sister Christian" makes you pee down your leg because it's the song your father used to beat you to.
In general, I think readers don't listen to music while they read, and I agree that music will affect both the input and output of a story. I don't like to listen to music because it alters how I perceive my own writing, and it's a distraction. Beyond that, though, since I can't control my reader's soundtrack, I think it's better, for me at least, to work in as sterile an environment as possible so I get a pure feeling the words induce.
Personally, I need quiet or the static of a public place, like a cafe or something.
"Sister Christian" makes you pee down your leg because it's the song your father used to beat you to.
Jesus, you're morbid.
The manipulation in a scene from a John Woo flick is a constant though, the song always accompanies that scene (unless they stupidly dub over terrible music for the English release), it's edited to fit the movement of the film and so on. You never see Thelma and Louise going over that cliff blasting Slayer.
What I thought when I read that Saunders thing is yeah, a song could at least create a false rhythm or hide mistakes in prose behind some cadence, so as a writing tool it may actually be more of a dice roll than a hard set tempo. Oh god, the mixed metaphors. I guess the real test would be to draft a chapter to Napalm Death, revise to Thomas Newman.
Here's that whole George Saunders article by the way. It's cute.
"For more than a decade," wrote the poet Mary Karr , explaining the choice, "George Saunders has been the best short-story writer in English – not 'one of', not 'arguably', but the Best." http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/19/hilary-mantel-time-100-world-influential
Blergh.
I mean, he's a good writer and all.
[...]
I was messing around with this notion in March when I wrote a particularly dark piece - I only listened to Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata (the whole thing - not just the first movement) during the first draft.
Not surprisingly, the music is evident in the pacing throughout - but not in a way that serves the story.
I don't need to recreate this experiment to verify my findings; for me, what I'm listening to, reading, seeing (try looking at Kandinsky all afternoon and then writing a lineal story - ain't happenin' for this kid) totally influences the writing, the same way writing outdoors/sitting on the grass will influence it.
I prefer to listen to jazz turned down low when I write. Something about it just works without being invasive, but even then every once in awhile I have to stop and listen.
Can you read and listen to music? I get super distracted by that, too. Tried listening to the new Patti Smith last summer while reading about Georgia O'Keeffe. Smith won.
Plus, when you read, your mind is very active, directing the movie version and costuming the characters and all that, engaging many senses. It's using a lot of RAM, so to speak. I can read if I'm in a restaurant with overhead music on. Takes me a few minutes, but I can zone in. Because there's a stream of words already waiting for me that I just have to follow along with, and it gets a rhythm going. Writing to familiar music is impossible for me, though, because I'm only focused on one little phrase at a time, looping it over and over in my mind, and will be defeated by the musical distraction every time, which already exists as a complete, fluid thing. I can write nonfiction/essays just fine with familiar music, however, because I don't really feel like I'm creating anything, worrying about consistency, voice, or any of that, just putting down words in my natural way.
I used to write to music all the time but over the last couple of years I've found I can't often do it. I think it's actually to do with how when I sit down to write something I want to get on with it, so unless I've got my heart set on hearing a particular album while I write I can't choose what to listen to. If I'm in my bedroom where the sound system is I've got around 600 different albums to choose from and I take too long to pick one, always trying to find the perfect writing album and then usually finding I'm in the wrong mood for the one I choose. So I just stopped bothering, mostly. If I'm really into what I'm writing I find I don't hear the music anyway, or any other sound around me, so there doesn't feel like much point.
I've experimented around a fair bit and for me I find instrumental guitar musicians seem to work — Govi, Ottmar Liebert, Bill Frisell and this local guy named Wayne White. Sometimes, though, I put white noise through the speakers and wear ear protection to block out nearly everything. I've also tried white noise with binaural beats, though I have no idea if it makes a difference. The most effective combination for me seems to be any of the above that includes disconnecting the internet.
I always listen to music while writing. Right now, I've been listening to a lot of The National and Bill Evans.
power electronics, harsh noise, drone, industrial, and extremely lo fi synth pop that sounds like it was recorded in an outhouse is pretty much the only thing i write to, but sometimes, especially lately, i put in earplug and enjoy the silence.
What's some synth pop stuff you've been playing, Simulacrum? I got pretty into all that old coldwave stuff a few years ago, I try to resist getting geeky over music anymore but anything synthy still demands my attention. I rarely listen to noise nowadays myself, and doubt I could ever write to it, but I'd probably consider it a major part of my personal aesthetic, for better or worse. But that's a different conversation altogether, and probably not an interesting one at that.
This kind of stuff:
I don't really have a preference. I don't need silence, and I don't need music. I find myself using music more when I am doing public writing, such as write-ins with my writer's group. Usually, I use some sort of music that seems to mirror what I am writing. When I wrote a screenplay set in a rural area, I listened to country. When I wrote my dark thriller novel, I listened to industrial metal. My most recent first draft, I wanted a classical noir feeling to the detective, so I listened to a lot of lounge music type stuff. Pandora is great for that sot of thing. Most of the time, when I am writing at home, I don't use anything. I haven't noticed any difference either way.
One of the best writing sessions I have ever had was in a bar, during the lunch rush. The cacophony just blocked everything specific out. I looked up and it was three hours later. I didn't even notice the waitress bring me the check.
@Renfield - Yes! I've had some of the Minimal Wave compilations playing a few times- Found Tapes, Lost Tapes, Minimal Wave Tapes, as well as So Young and So Cold. Some of that stuff is so corny and geeky, which I still like, but some of it is just so damn cool and stylish; I feel like I should be wearing sunglasses and hacking into old 80's IBM computer servers while strobe lights are flashing. Have you heard of this label in Denmark, Posh Isolation? They have a little bit of black metal and gloomy post-punk, but most of it is noise, and they've all been bitten by the synth bug. If yr still in2 it, look up traxxx by LR, Puce Mary, Damien Dubrovnik and Croatian Amor. As for synth-pop, there's Vår, Lust For Youth, Grimes, Zola Jesus, and Tollund Men. There's a bunch more, but I don't want to overload you with names. See if this kind of stuff is your speed:
I didnt notice that you changed your avatar. i thought you were someone else. i remember we talked about sotos and whitehouse in the books you picked up thread. i dont know what it is, and you probably cant get my back on this since you havent or dont think you could write to noise, about later whitehouse, starting with cruise, that i can write to over other noise or power electronics with vocals. philip bests lyrics and vocals are so nasty and hateful...maybe youve noticed he does rip some lines from sotos books...but maybe its because theyre discernible and not distorted like most noise vooxxx that i am able to tune them out. also, excuse my lack of style and lowercase. litreactor is not kind to those posting from phones.
@Sim --- Some of that Sacred Bones stuff is really good. Amen Dunes (not synth) have a few near-perfect tunes.
Philip Glass. End of statement.
Philip Glass. End of statement.
Good call. I do love his stuff.
@Simulacrum I think I already tap later Whitehouse for inspiration lyrically that listening to it and others while writing would be too much. Titles like WRIGGLE LIKE A FUCKING EEL are very influential as far setting a bar for good as hell titles, let alone all the sick xerox visual imagery of power electronics. That stuff is every essence of punk rock I wish punk rock had. Moreso I have flat out imitated the voice of Slogun, which is then itself an imitation of serial killer ramblings.
seriously, phillip bests contributions to late period whitehouse are, in my opinion, the most valuable. tompkins seemed very definitive and obviously sotos contributions, especially the sound collages he writes that he would obsess over, defined a certain era of wh, but bests lyrics, even the text on the covers of cruise and bird seed are amazing. lines like those in guru will always hit harder than those of any hardcore, punk, or powerviolence. granted, i suppose i really only listened to whitehouse and similar pe acts when i was working on a sort of psychosexual piece that i am lucky did not alienate any of my friends, and i would get drunk and put something like that on to set the mood. if i do listen to anything similar to that now that im not working on things of similar tenor, i really dont opt for power electronics. i will say that the aesthetic of it, the visual aspect, is very important to me and influential in more private corners of my life. its just too bad i cant put a xerox of a xerox of a terribly mutilated body on the cover of something ive written and expect it to sell to anyone besides maybe ten people who touch themselves to mikko aspa projects.
do you make noise, renfield? or do you just imitate slogun in conversation?
To answer original post: While I personally am into metal, to write I can only get into "the zone" with - dead silence!
