What, if anything, do you like listening to when you’re writing? Do you use ambient sounds, music, or do you just prefer silence? And do you associate particular music with playing particular CoG or HG games?
I love making playlists for different projects and find that a well tailored playlist can help get me in the writing zone. It’s mostly soundtracks without lyrics, though sometimes a song with lyrics will creep in - not too many or I get distracted. When I really need extra focus, I use ambient sounds like white noise, library or coffee shop type soundscapes. I can get bored with that, though, so that’s mostly for emergencies.
Lots of TwoStepsFromHell. (Spirit of Moravia (see below) helps greatly with writing the superhero parts of CuriousCuisine e.g. ), lots of stuff from various genres, mostly to get ‘into’ a character’s head (example below is for me ‘weird’ characters… NSFW warning on that one)
Depends honestly, mainly setting or by scene.I try and write to songs that have no lyrics, or at least none I can understand. I find myself accidentally writing down the words if I ever do.
Honestly writing action synthwave or classic rock. Fantasy or adventuring dragon age soundtrack, or the dark souls soundtrack. Lofi is kinda this weird mutual in between for me.
Yeah, music with lyrics tend to distract me too, but soundtracks are great to write to. Things like Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings are always good. Also game soundtracks like Final Fantasy and Dragon Age. Anything Hanz Zimmer or John Williams is great. Recently I’ve been listening to the Memoirs of a Geisha soundtrack while I write. It’s really relaxing and doesn’t distract at all.
I have the entire soundtrack on my phone, I just wish I didn’t have to bootleg in the bard songs (they didn’t include them for some reason). If you like the orchestral pieces of the soundtrack try listening to the dark souls soundtrack, my personal favorite is Lord Gwyn(?) of cinders. It’s beautiful and it no joke makes me want to write my characters breaking points .
@Avery_Moore Check out the west world soundtrack by ramin djawadi he did the music for game of thrones. It might suit well for writing fantasy to.
Well, for me, its honestly random. It goes from classical to death metal but what i see is the mood genre creates heavily effects my writing.
While i listen to rock&metal i see myself creating adventurous scenes and mostly choices
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While im listening to chill-step or such i find myself working on world creating and things which would satisfy the reader and fill the gaps in the background story
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While im listening to slow sad songs(i can’t tell the genre so im sharing one of my favorites below) i find myself writing more deep and philosophical texts, not giving many choices to reader.
So it’s undeniable that music effects my writing and i like to examine how it does so
I switch what I listen to quite often. (My bookmarks has thousands of different songs.) Sometimes, when in a rough writing session, I listen to something like:
I have everything from instrumentals to recordings of actual white noise for those times.
Sometimes, when I need inspiration but I still don’t want too much intrusion into my thoughts I listen to:
Usually, when all else fails, and I need a comfort song, I listen to one one of the versions of Scarbarrow Fair I have. Right now, this is my go-to:
although, as I said I must have a few score different variations of the song to chose from in my list.
Before I used to write with differents playlists depending on the scene. For example, I’ve the “songs to fuck my life” for sad and drama scenes, “badass” for fight scenes and “baby-making playlist” for… Other types of scene. It has a great effect in my inspiration or something like that.
But now I prefer the silence. It’s more easy to organize my thoughts and reread the scene several times. I get distracted easy, so without music it’s less likely that I miss the focus.
I find it really hard to write with music playing, lyrical or no, because my mind will often wander with it and create a bunch of scenarios for the song rather than…doing what I’m supposed to.
With that a given, I do love listening to music before I write or when I need inspiration for the same reason. Sometimes a song will come on and I’ll just go, ‘oh! That would totally be the theme song for x’, or ‘that sounds exactly like some x would do’, or ‘x would think of x for sure if they heard this song’, or I might imagine random scenes with a character x dancing, or fighting, or having a heated conversation, or it playing in the background as they receive an important call, or singing, etc. to the music.
…It’s rather odd now that it’s all typed out, but if it works it works?
