Meme - Day 7

7. Do you listen to music while you write? What kind? Are there any songs you like to relate/apply to your characters?

I can't listen to music while I write. I have a hard time writing if there is a lot of unfamiliar noise - TV, radio, lots of traffic etc. That is probably why most of my writing was done later in the night. I have kind of gotten past the traffic thing, but I still can't write with music on at all.

I do feel I'm influenced by music a lot when I write though. When I wrote In The System, a pre-Brookline novel, it was set in the 1980s, and to get myself in the right frame of mind, I listened to a lot of music I thought the main character would listen to. As I wrote the novel, I ended up creating a soundtrack for specific scenes in the book, just as if it were a movie. I found it helped me ground the novel in a specific time period. A lot of times there is a specific song that might speak to me.

My novel La Muerta always smacked of the song Heart of Gold by Neil Young. I can't really say the lyrics are why, but something about the sound of the music reminded me of the desert, which was a big part of the setting. The images of dust and hot sun and cracked earth always stayed with me when I wrote it, and the song brings a lot of that back for some reason.

I've also used song titles for novel titles. Some work, some don't. I'm a bad titler in general, so it's hard for me to find good ones.

In the Brookline prequels, Joy was all about the hair metal. I heard a lot of Skid Row, Bon Jovi, Guns n Roses etc when she was around. It helped to play it before or after I wrote, or before bed. The music always got me thinking about the story. When I wrote fan fiction, I'd listen to music from the era as well, it helped me feel connected to another time.

So I like the vibe music can bring, but I definitely can't have it on as I write - even instrumental stuff distracts me.