Do you like to have music on when you write, or do you need to keep silent to hear the characters talk?

I’m mixed on this one.

I have a CD called “The Yearning,” that is all alto flutes–soft and solid and flighty, all at once. This music has been known to reverse my blood flow and explain to my heart that we’re now leaving the reality of MY life and going to some alternate world where it’s possible to imagine some things happening that really didn’t take place. When I put on that CD, my family groans and yet my monkey mind knows that I mean, ”Get in here, calm down, stop reading the entire internet, and let your mind open up !”

I’ve been depending on the solemnity of alto flutes to write my books for years.

But now with this last book, I discovered something that worked better: songs that showed the emotion of the story I’m writing. In fact, while writing “Kissing Games of the World,” suddenly there was a whole host of songs that seemed to illustrate some character trait or point I was needing to make.

The main guy, Nate, was kind of a lost soul who had a deep wounded tenderness that made had made him tough and unwilling to let his guard down. I noticed that every time I’d hear the Eagles’ song, “Desperado,” I’d have to run to my laptop to get down some new insight I had about Nate. There was Nate, unwilling to come down from his fences and let anybody love him, and when I’d hear the Eagles, I’d know exactly what he was thinking.

Same with Jamie, the main female character. She’s an artist who struggles to make ends meet, and everytime she’s ever loved anybody, things have gone badly. For her, I liked “The Hard Way” by Mary Chapin Carpenter, and also Norah Jones’s song, “Cold, Cold Heart” when she can’t seem to get through to Nate.

And as for their situation and their crazy household, the only song that summed up for me the joys of domestic chaos was “Just Another Day in Paradise,” a country song by Phil Vassar.

I ended up making a whole CD of songs that would put me in the minds of the characters in the book. It seemed a little like cheating (or a fascinating new way of procrastinate!) but, hey, it worked! I felt as though I had discovered a terrific shortcut right to the heart of my story any time I heard the songs.

Some songs that helped me were:

 ”I Want to Know What Love Is” (Foreigner)

“Down to Zero” (Joan Armatrading)

“I Am Not in Love” (Ten CC)

“Shut Up and Kiss Me” (Mary Chapin Carpenter)

“I Want You” (Bob Dylan)

“She’s Everything” (Brad Paisley)

“Dance Me to the End of Love” (Madeleine Peyroux)

“Real Good Man” (Tim McGraw)

“Each Other’s Medicine” (Patti Scialfa)

“Fix You” (Coldplay)

“An Innocent Man”  

 

I haven’t come up with a soundtrack yet for the new book I’m working on, but I do find that now–when I’m writing a pivotal sex scene–the one thing I do know is that the characters respond exactly to the song “Hallelujah.”

The Rufus Wainwright edition, of course. Nobody else gives me that same sense of just handing one’s soul over to another.

I think I need to go to the itunes site and find all their other songs now, too, don’t you? I mean, in the name of research and time-saving and inspiration and all.