Like a lot of people, I can’t write without music. I find silence the fastest route to procrastination. Suddenly I’m painfully aware of the clock ticking, the noise of passing cars and the hum of the fridge. My mind instantly wanders to mundane things and my fingers hover uselessly over the keys.
But more than this, I find the emotion in music vital to help me create. The way the music makes me feel sets the tone for the stories I create. The songs I listen to while writing become inseparable from the words on the page, so that every time I read my words back I hear those same songs in my head.
And vice versa. Every time I listen to that music my imagination is launched right back into the world, the characters and the relationships I was creating, and I feel immediately inspired to continue the story.
For this reason, everything I write has a corresponding playlist on my Spotify account. Each time I return to that story, I dive right back into its playlist as well.
I’m a playlist maker anyway. I have a playlist for every social event I’ve thrown, every holiday I’ve been on, every mood I feel, every activity I do.
Part of me feels I cannot share what I have written without also sharing the music, or you aren’t getting the whole story.
As I was writing Seriously Grown Up No Machine Ice Cream, even though it was non-fiction, I still needed the music. I was drawn to sunny, cheerful music that reminded me of summer, long evenings, G&Ts in the garden and ice cream.
It was this playlist that was the background music at my launch earlier this month, and now it is public on Spotify.
A.J. Alexander 