In discussions with other writers, this question often comes up: what do you listen to while you write?
It’s entirely possible, of course, to write without music playing, and I do that sometimes. But I live in a house with five other people and a dog, so there are many distractions. Putting on a set of headphones and blocking out everything else is often very helpful.
Some types of music are more conducive to writing than others. Personally, I prefer instrumental music for this purpose. Words are another distraction and might work themselves into what I’m writing, if I’m not careful.
I’ve experimented with numerous choices, browsing Soundcloud and YouTube. I’ve found a few obscure artists that I like and use from time to time. Here’s one example: Denny Schneidemesser. Check him out.
There are three movie soundtracks I kept coming back to while writing my novel in November and December. I enjoy a lot of soundtracks, but these three just clicked with me for some reason. All three of these are on YouTube in full.
The first is How To Train Your Dragon by John Powell. While I love the Lord of the Rings soundtracks, they’ve become far too iconic in my head. I can’t listen to them without specifically thinking of the movies. With How To Train Your Dragon, however, the music is not locked into specific things in my head (though occasionally, I can’t help but think of riding a dragon through the clouds…). I like the movie, but the music is beautiful and sweeping on its own. It’s also varied enough to move me through different moods.
The second is Oblivion (the movie, not the video game) by M83, Anthony Gonzalez, and Joseph Trapanese. It comes from a 2013 Tom Cruise sci-fi movie which wasn’t extremely popular. However, the soundtrack is excellent. It’s engaging enough through both quiet and action scenes, and it slowly builds to an impressive climax. There’s a melancholy woven throughout this whole soundtrack, and that can play strongly into quieter writing scenes. While I don’t find myself thinking much about the actual movie, if I catch a glimpse of the track titles, it does bring something to mind: the iconic Thomas Macauley quote that is used as a theme throughout Oblivion. That’s not a bad thing; it’s a theme that can play into what I’m writing from time to time.
The third and most recent soundtrack that I find myself listening to is Hacksaw Ridge by Rupert Gregson-Williams. I don’t listen to the entire soundtrack on this one, but the second half, which is pretty much all battle scenes, is tense and exciting. There are many, many “battle scene” music choices, but this one just really works for me, for some reason. It’s hard to nail down the exact reason.
And that’s the way it is for most people, I’ve found. Music enjoyment is subjective (not unlike literary agents and queries). Everyone has different tastes and different favorites. These are some of mine. What are yours?
I always thought I’d write an epic fantasy series. I was going to be the next J.R.R. Tolkien. Or something.
In junior high, I created a world. A friend who was also interested in fantasy helped with the map because he wanted to write some stories in a different region of the world. It was one part awesome and three parts ridiculous. (Seriously. There was a country named Paulania, because the king’s name was Paul.)
I wrote stories where kids from our world traveled to this one (Narnia? What’s that?). Some of these got typed on the manual typewriter I mentioned in the last post. Most were hand-written in spiral notebooks.
When I got older, I thought the world and much of its creation still held promise, but the stories needed major changes. First of all… these kids from our earth didn’t add ANYTHING to the story. Why did I even have them there? (Oh, yea. Narnia.) I ditched the kids and went back to writing just the world’s residents.
This novel was started, abandoned, started over, abandoned, completely re-written, lost, started over, and abandoned… maybe not in that particular order. Eventually, I used the setting and basic plot as part of a RPG campaign that went pretty well. I even considered re-writing it again with elements and characters from that campaign.
Because this was what I was supposed to do, right? Epic fantasy! It’s what I had been working on my whole life. But… it just wasn’t working. Ever. No matter how many times I tried, it was still too derivative, too cliche.
When I finally published a book (self-published in 2015), it wasn’t even fiction! I wrote an Advent study guide, primarily for my family and church friends. That was NEVER on my radar of what I would write, until it actually happened. (link)
However, the exercise of completing that small project gave me the motivation and encouragement I needed to get back to writing in general. I toyed with a number of ideas over the next year, but nothing seemed to click. I began to lose motivation again.
Then… mid-October last year, I got a bizarre image in my head. I began to wonder about it, and before long, an entire world and storyline exploded out of it. I wrote down a lot of ideas and thoughts and even wrote a few pages.
I was browsing online and saw National Novel Writing Month for November. I had seen it before, but never really considered it. Now I did. It was a challenge. I had an idea that might work. I needed motivation. This was it.
I wrote a novel. Full-length. 76,000 words. (50K during Nov., to reach the goal, and the rest added in early December.)
But it wasn’t epic fantasy. It was YA fantasy, told in first person point of view. This was totally different from anything I had written or had planned to write. It wasn’t even traditional fantasy – the story contains modern-day elements and even some sci-fi pieces.
Yet it works. I’m actually quite proud of it. After lots of editing, revisions, and feedback from beta readers, I’m now in the process of searching for an agent. But that’s another story.
One day, an idealized number of years ago, a little boy told his mother, “I want to write books!” His mother smiled and supported him. She showed him how to cut a brown paper grocery bag in the right way to have 10-15 blank pages to staple together. Th
e boy promptly wrote and drew a story of superheroes versus Godzilla. And aliens.
A few years later, the boy announced that he wanted to learn how to type. After all, how could he become a writer without typing? He saved his money and his dad took him to the local pawn shop, where he bought a beat-up blue manual typewriter. He borrowed a textbook from the library and worked through the lessons all alone. It wasn’t long before he was able to move on from stick figure comic books.
For a time, he dabbled in mystery stories, like the Hardy Boys, but soon returned to the fantastic worlds that so filled his imagination (fired by Lewis, Tolkien, Lawhead, and others). He typed stories of superheroes and monsters, swords and laser guns.
When he reached college, he majored in Writing, learning all he could about the English language, the process of writing, and more. He tolerated the technical side and reveled in the creative. His teachers enjoyed his talent and encouraged him to use it.
Then “real life” took over. Out of college, he had to find a real job, and no matter how he searched, the jobs never had much to do with writing. He plugged away on a massive fantasy novel, but it slowly got pushed aside. He got married, had kids. All forms of writing got pushed farther and farther aside, becoming abandoned for years at a time. For a short while, he found new hope in writing book reviews and started a website, but that too had to be abandoned because of busyness.
Which brings us to the present. I’m no longer the little boy. The typewriter is long gone, as is college. The pressures of life have not subsided, but the desire to use my writing talent has returned with a fervor.
And so the writing journey had a resurrection in 2015. I’ll tell you more about that next time…
Welcome to my blog! Most likely you’re here because you followed one of my social media links. Or maybe you just like to browse every new blog that comes along. (In which case, I want your job. How do you have that much free time? There’s over 100 million blogs, you know!)
In any event, this is my newest outlet for my writing, a place where I can ramble on a bit more than I do on Facebook and far more than is allowed on Twitter (unless you cheat and post a screenshot of a bunch of writing).
At this point, some of you may be wondering if I’m going to end every single paragraph with a parenthetical statement. (The answer is: no, I’m not. I actually have a bad habit of using ellipses more than parenthesis…)
The focus for this blog is my writing. Over the coming weeks, I’ll elaborate more about what I’ve written, what I’m planning to write, and so on. I’ll also go into the writing process, where I get ideas, books I’m reading, and so on.
I will not be using this blog to discuss politics. I have political opinions, but I’ve learned over the years that the internet is the worst place to share them. If you want to talk in person about politics sometime, I’m game. But I won’t be doing it here.
I also won’t be talking much about my personal life outside of how it relates to writing. That’s what Facebook is for, to share those things with my family and friends. (It’s also not for politics.)
I also will not be doing much talking about my faith here. As much as it is an essential part of who I am, it’s not the topic of this blog. Again, I would love to discuss it in person, but this is not the place, except as far as it relates to writing.
In case I haven’t made it clear… this blog is about writing! My primary writing focus right now is a YA (Young Adult) fantasy novel named Viridia. The novel is complete and I’m seeking just the right literary agent to help me sell it. If it works out, this could be the beginning of a series. More on that later.
For now, I’ll go play with the design and settings of this site some more until I’m happy with them. I look forward to sharing with you all!