Light some candles, flick on your favorite smooth singer, and sit back and relax it’s time for some- writing?
This image was used alongside my short Story at http://www.absentwillowreview.com/ Since the site has been closed- I can’t find the artists name. This isn’t my painting, but someone extremely talented.
Whoah, that’s not right, is it? Ah, you thought I was going somewhere else with that right? ;) Well setting the mood is also a great activity to do when you’re working on your draft. Music and atmosphere can resonate through your ears and out through your fingers letting out some of the most passionate writing you can muster or it may just distract you. Different strokes for different folks they say. I’m 50/50.
I remember when I was thirteen a friend of the families gave me my first Mp3 player; that was sometime in 2006. The world had opened and gone be the days where a bulky portable CD player would hog up my pocket space. This 512 mb gadget housed eighty or so songs and I quickly used it to add a soundtrack to my reading of the time. The latter Hogwarts years blasted by alongside the ferocity of Disturbed, the darkness of Marilyn Manson, and the angst of Linkin Park. This also led me to Write many rip-off poems and lyrics that still loiter on crumbled notebooks pages buried somewhere in my desk. This sort of music helped me shape the world I was reading.
Now for creation; for many years I wrote in absolute silence. I was under the impression that any song with lyrics may influence or distract my writing, so I instead pursued a pure environment void of outside stimuli; essentially a step up from an isolation tank. Though sometimes it’s hard to enter the mood of a dark tale when the sun is blaring through your windows and the sounds of neighborly children are chirping outside of your windows.
My current wip (ah, you’re saying that at 1000 words a day I should be done. Shush, I fell behind.. a little.. bit.. shh), is dark. Vampires and such. It’s a rewrite of my short story “Cycles” that I had published last June. This story is now much darker and has abandoned much of the comical or outlandish nature; it’s gruesome, morbid, and real. I have begun to write this with my shades pulled down, candles or in-cents burning in my bedroom and dark heavy music blaring through my headphones. I’ve found that the Korn Pandora station offers some of the best mix of the type of atmospheric tunes I desire.
Does music help you write scenes better? Do you have any specific rituals you do before you write? Leave your comments below!
Filed under: writing Tagged: dark, fiction, horror, korn, music, setting the mood, short story, vampires, writing
This post first appeared on The Gray Pen | Writer, Musician, Student Of The Ar, please read the originial post: here
