Chasing Wattpad

Writing and Music

Do you write to music? Or is that even correct? Maybe write with music makes more sense? Because the music that I write with joins in the writing, I think. It's not just a background noise to help me concentrate, it helps me write, and it helps me remember. It pushes the words along. It may even create them, or at least, help me find them. Sure, I choose the music I am going to listen to when I write, so maybe I making the choices about my story long before I sit down to write and it is reflected in my choice of music. I say that because I don't know (consciously) what I am going to write about until I read the words on the page myself. 

I do write without music. Mostly on the days that I have the topic picked out already. A follow up to a series I am writing maybe, or when I am having trouble hearing myself. Sometimes you have to find silence to find the right words, other times music brings you those fragile and fleeting moments where the words live. 

A few years back I wrote a short true story about a time in my life when I was in the third and fourth grades in elementary school. It's called "The Flavor of Us", and no, don't lie, you haven't read it. lol. I didn't sit down with the intent to write that story. I sat down to write and I heard a song come on the radio, and there was the story. I hadn't thought about it since then. But it was hiding in that song, and in between the years the story happened and now. The song itself had nothing to do with the story, but the song took me there to where the story lived. I love that about music. It is loyal to stories it lived in. 

If I want to write a story about my childhood,  even before I know what the story is, I will play 70's music. If I want to write about stories that happened in my high school years I'll play some 80's music in the background while I write. They help put me there in the place I was when the story was happening. If I don't want to write, but feel like I should, I'll play one of my Pandora stations that play a mix of upbeat music to get me started. But those are mine, and I know you have your own music (except for you kids today, that's not music) that bridges the gap between you and your words. 

But as much as music takes you to places it once lived in for you, it also creates new spaces for you to live in. There is music you can listen to the very first time and it feels like you have always known that music. As if you wrote it, or it was written for just you. Now that music, which I'm listening to now (above), is the music I can write anything with. If helps find stories it has no business knowing. The music wasn't around when the story came into being, but it finds it anyway. 

The only explanation I can think of is that some music lives everywhere. Somehow it can open up every place you have ever been to, and maybe some places you have yet to go. That is exactly what your writing should be like. 

I love those secret gaps between the music, the feelings, and the written word. That spot between the known and unknown. The point in time where that feeling and emotion try so hard to become the right word on a page. That's magic. 

The search for that spot is what makes you a writer. 

I hope all of you are having a great writing week.