Music and Writing

Looking at grad school programs. Some of them are really interested in making sure writers know how to talk about their writing process. This is a mysterious and personal subject. Certain things help everyone, but no two processes are exactly alike and no method will always work. Everyone hits a wall sometimes.

I like to listen to music. But it has to be a certain kind of music. I love music I can sing along to, but that makes trouble when I am supposed to be writing because I end up typing song lyrics in with whatever I'm working on.
The solution to this is sound tracks and classical music without vocals, or with vocals in another language.

Recently I have been reading various authors talk about what it feels like when they are writing well. A lot of people describe a feeling of discovery rather than creation, letting characters go their own way, rather than inventing a character and making them do certain things. I don't know if I've ever had that experience. But I have slipped into a mode where ideas come and language flow easily and it builds until I am not stopping to scratch my head about how I'm going to describe something or come up with a motivation for a character to do something. It's a really great feeling.

In trying to articulate this, I found myself using the same kind of language that I might use to describe some of the music I like to listen to when I write. This is what it feels like. 

(and if you haven't seen How To Train Your Dragon, you should look up the clip that corresponds to this track. Animators having fun with body language, no dialogue necessary.)

And before this dragon movie became my guilty pleasure, (along with kung fu panda) I listened to this:

That's what a good writing day sounds like.