I'm out of craft book writing related exercises to suggest. So, I have to come up with my own now. (I don't have ideas of my own actually.)
Who listens to music while they write? Do you ever find it inspires you to write something different? Have you ever written something to capture the idea of a song?
I can't handle things with lyrics. They end up squirming their way into my writing and repeating because my internal monologue is just a soundtrack. But there's a thing to be said for non-lyric based music.
A writing challenge: share some kind of music and write a short piece of writing that captures the feeling.
Need an idea? Here's a piano piece about being buried alive.
I absolutely cannot stand listening to music while doing anything else. It exerts such a powerful magnetism over me that it's impossible for me to focus while it's playing, instrumental or not.
I don't get inspired to write by the "musical" part of music--that is, everything but the lyrics of a song. The sensations induced in me by music are of such a different class from the thoughts and emotions that go into writing that I might more accurately class "music trips" together with "drug trips" in my mind. It's an often enjoyable experience, but not one that could be usefully "translated" into anything but music, especially not human language. Lyrics, on the other hand, can and do lead me to write, like inspiring like. Or rather, I often get piqued by thoughtless lyrics and incorporate elements into my writing demonstrating what the result would be of taking them seriously when in a lucid frame of mind.
By the way, Rachmaninoff is said to have felt similarly; he strenuously denied that the Prelude in C# was supposed to "represent" being buried alive, or anything else, for that matter.
All that notwithstanding, I'll see if I can find some music to "misinterpret"--in the same way that Keats misinterpreted the Grecian urn (see Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism)--so as to have something to write for the exercise. I'll leave another comment if so.
I listen to music while going on walks, and usually something comes (then I try to remember it or scribble it down on the phone). I also find it tricky to listen to stuff with lyrics while also writing - brain just gets too distracted to put words on the page.
That said, trying to capture/evoke the feeling of a song on paper is a really interesting exercise. It becomes almost entirely about the 'vibe' rather than trying to actually write any kind of story. Just messing around with word choices, sentences, POV, that kind of thing, so the result isn't usually super interesting for others to read. But then when writing something 'properly', training that skill of being able to evoke a specific feeling on demand is useful.
That's why I like the writing exercises. More about training a skill than trying to produce something that's great literature. Takes the pressure off.
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u/umlaut(14, virgin, married) Modern Popular Genre Prose Editor Dude8d ago
Like others, I can't write if there are lyrics. Luckily, I like a lot of music with no lyrics or unintelligible lyrics. At home, in a busy living room, I find it better to have something moody with rhythm to drown out other noises so I can focus.
Music seems to distract me from wanting to turn away every minute or two to see what is happening on the internet. I don't want to sing along, I want to occupy the parts of my brain that are trying to wander off and do something else.
I can write really well when I listen to music, especially non-lyrical stuff. Phonk songs and electronic ones help a lot. I write action, so they just kinda push me through. But not all the time; my ears eventually get burnt out, usually after 3–4 hours.
I've thought of a writing exercise which a lot of writers here should try out. Maybe you could do it next week/week after/whenever. Also, I don't do most of these writing prompt things because they're all too long. I'm not writing 500 words ( in a polished state that's like hours of work for me, I could be writing gay vampire porn instead, I'd much rather do that).
So my writing exercise idea is about setting.
Too often I'm reading someone's work and I will find myself bitching like a little bitch 'THESE CHARACTERS ARE TALKING HEADS IN A WHITE BOX'. The author hasn't described the setting of the scene at all so I'm not grounded in it, and I have no idea where the characters are, or why they're there, or sometimes even who they are, but that's another thing entirely.
I'd like to see how the writers here could set a scene, in one, two or three sentences, (NO MORE THAN THAT BECAUSE IT WILL GET SKIMMED, NO EXPOSITION DUMPS, NO USELESS GARBAGE) using more senses than merely visual, and relating it all to the pov character, through their eyes. It's an essential skill, a bit like quick character sketching is an essential skill.
Make it interesting! Make it contrast to the action! Make it unexpected! Make it weird! MOST IMPORTANTLY, MAKE IT SHORT!
One, two, three sentences at most.
The point is, to seamlessly ground the reader to the point they don't notice the setup.
Next one could be character sketches, in exactly the same vein.
Also I love listening to music while I write. I have playlists.
'THESE CHARACTERS ARE TALKING HEADS IN A WHITE BOX'.
That is too much me but it is also me writing how I think and experience the world. My senses often get in the background as I focus on words and ideas. It is something I work on but always finding myself forgetting.
Aphantasia is kind of hip right now and so I don't like to say it. Still there is a touch of it in my mind. Images don't linger and it's hard to write in a way that doesn't always feel like something that will be skimmed. But at the same times two of the most impactful pieces of writing in my life are primarily descriptions of an environment.
The first page of A Farewell to Arms is just describing a tree and how the marching of soldiers has affected it. In my first reading I skimmed it but in my second reading I realized it was a foreshadowing of the entire book.
And then Ray Bradbury's Foghorn where the environment, the lighthouse and the sea all made me feel lonely. It is the first time I remember feeling something because I read it.
So I know environmental description is powerful but haven't acquired the discipline of using it well.
I could leave an essay on this, but I'll keep it simple. I started both writing and making music at a young age, and both of these artistic domains have enough overlap (beyond the abstracted top-down view of art vs non art) that they've intersected frequently in my life. I usually do listen to music while writing. In fact, I'm almost always listening to music while doing anything. Sometimes I listen to music while creating music.
Something I believe is that art is and always has been both subjective and independent from its creator. The moment the final brush stroke has been made and the piece completed, whether it be music, literature, or any other form of art, the art itself has already transcended the creator and become an independent entity. Beyond this point, the "meaning" of the art piece is detached from the original intentions of the creator.
In that sense, whenever I listen to music, I always ignore and sometimes shut off the creators and their vision altogether. I have my own artistic vision, and the music I experience shapes itself into a meaning unique to myself, and these experiences inspire an urge to create art, which I do either through writing or composing. A virtuous cycle. The end product is usually very different from the inspiration.
I think ezk shared something from John Green about how books aren't the property of the author, but the story is the product of the author's intentions and the reader's individual experiences. And so, to a certain extent, to create is to let go of expectations. And to stop judging yourself so much for is this good or bad.
Something like that. It is an interesting debate in the arts. There was a controversy a while back where The bonze stature The Fearless Girls was placed in front of the Charging Bull statue on Wall Street. It was devisive to artists because the placement changed the meaning of the original statue in a way that negated the original artist's intention (destroying their art). I have a similiar reaction to Wicked which changed the meaning of the original Wizard of Oz books.
Green begrudging accepts that once he puts his art into the world it is no longer his but in practice trusts his audience to make it better. He has been a prolific sharer of art inspired by his books.
For my part, I actually lean more towards Plato's art is inspired by the gods and creating art. Creating art is a kind of madness which neither belongs to the artists or the audience but is received by both who can wrestle with it but not own or define it.
The human brains can only do one thing at once. If you're listening to music you're not writing. Prove me wrong! Rub your belly and pat your head at the same time. See? How much did that suck? Lots.
Watch my experiment. At a certain point I'm going to turn on some music and see what blrrrrrruslg usahglasdfk fasldfkalfdkjdsa flkjasdf duddrsgh.
Okay I turned it off again. You see what I'm saying. What you CAN do, is go for a drive, listen to some music, and get all inspired and stuff. Just so long as you don't come back and assume those vibes will translate into your typing. Your readers didn't just listen to Adele for like four solid hours back and forth along the lakeshore or in circles around your ex's house. We need clues to get there, emotionally.
I really struggle to write (or sometimes read) with music in the background, one thing always gets lost behind the other. Occasionally I will put on ambient music but that's usually because there is some other even more distracting noise I am trying to block out.
Every time i get inspired by a song I feel like whatever I write just ends up a worse version of the song. I've been listening to a lot of Forever Howlong by BCNR recently, one of the stories i posted recently was just a worse version of 'for the cold country'. I tried writing a different song from the same album but ended up with the same problem where it diverges from the thing that inspired it to the point that it feels like the story just gets lost in itself and goes nowhere. Otherwise i feel like what I write gets fitted into a structure where I feel like the essence of what inspired me to write it in the first place just gets lost.
I also feel like a lot of songs would better fit a poem than a story in that they capture a tone, experience, or phenomena rather than something as structured as a narrative, but I suck at writing poetry. I've heard a lot of classical songs which are similar in structure to narratives but I don't listen to classical music that much.
I always have music in my ears when I read, always music in the background when I write. It can be anything although I tend to avoid anything with too much lyrics. I find music acts as a barrier that shuts off the world around me and allows me to be fully immersed in my work.
I do notice however how the songs I'm listening to impact what I write. Not always in a good way. So, I try to avoid anything too sad as it makes me write trite prose. I also associate songs with books I read. I can't listen to Air's Virgin suicides without bringing memeories from Harry Potter.
I tend to choose either some athmospheric electronic music or long symphonies. These days I write a lot listening to Mahler symphonies.
I’ve recently been thinking of writing in terms of music’s scale degrees through the ideas of theme and content in relation to the ideas of the tonic, supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant, submediant, and leading tones: I, ii, iii, IV, V, vi, vii°.
For instance employing the structure in the composition of melody, which I take as a complete musical thought, for the distribution of the content in a story which relates to the theme. The contents in the story would thus be arranged through thematic elements.
So I ask a childlike question, how may I divide story elements into discrete aspects of content which relate to the scale degrees ie what would be the tonic, etc? Well authorial emphasis could play a part like like velocity on a keyboard, but here I’m already getting too subtle. No, I need to think like an imbecile untutored in the ways of prosody.
It’s actually quite easy for me to think like an imbecile since well I have so much exposure and first hand experience because I am one in so many ways, as I always have to check myself from speaking out about fields of which I know nothing.
So the Tonic I would place finger to finger with a Character for the reason of its ability to color interactions with the all the other aspects of story. Here, at the moment of time, I became unfortunately too self-aware and realized how isolated I am from other people as if the way I think is so very foreign to other people as if it were a standard emotional deviation from the norm. I realized only imbeciles hold in the center of their being that they are truly deep down inside different than all humanity. The illusional self-awareness subsided.
I turned my attention to a thematic character and how I may deviate their soul as an engendering of some contingent theme. Here the meta-conceptual framework will need to be utilized. If only I was free to choose what I choose as a theme, but I must open the lexicon of my heart to a page which will suit the character’s theme; however there is only one word left on my heart, loss. It was once love, but the v and e have suffered a change. No, the character’s theme would be loss. So the naming of the actual character would reflect this idea. Obviously, I’m not free to choose and I recognize the naming convention is nothing more than the micro-narrative of Achilles. His name means grief and grief is merely a metonymy of loss.
So the tonic is the character and this particular character is made of the stuff of loss, so the theme of loss can now be instantiated since the meta-conceptual idea has been chosen, but I acknowledge I was never free to choose as I am a prisoner of my own vast limitations. What can a character lose? Only that which they are attached to: god, family, home, war, respect, memory, etc. So then rest of the scale degrees can simply parallel those ideas.
The organization of the story can begin as pitch rhythm which is what a melody actually is. Here at my moment of tying this thread of notes together I feel a sudden wave of depression singular and as old as the awareness of myself wash over me.
What melody to use, let’s use the simple one; twinkle twinkle little star.
I think in scale degrees Twinkle Twinkle is: 22556654433221.
So in scale degrees as scene content organization follows:
The Tonic is 1, The Character
The Supertonic 2, god
The mediant 3, family
The Subdominant 4, Home
The Dominant 5, War
The Submediant 6, respect
The Leading Tone 7, memory
Scene 1, the loss of god, the loss of god,
Scene 2, the loss of War, the loss of War
Scene 3, the loss of respect, the loss of respect
Scene 4, the loss of War
Scene 5, the loss of Home, the loss of Home
Scene 6, the loss of family, the loss of family
Scene 7, the loss of god, the loss of god
Scene 8, the loss of the Character.
In sum, this is how I have been thinking of story through music.
Constantly, and my autistic ass blasts any genre. Especially dark hip hop and screaming 2005 post hardcore bands, and also the genre screamo which is different from screaming.
In the Tiffany chapter where all the dorm girls are sharing their favorite love songs in a kind of music debate I had Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough playing on repeat with noise cancelling earphones. The chapter is intended to be chirpy and happy with Tiffany being awarded the love and appreciation of her dormmates (most of whom she never names) but when she thinks of love she thinks about how hurt her dad was when her mom left the family. I was hoping the thread that forlorn despair in the middle of a chapter of Tiffany "winning" at life.
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u/Lisez-le-lui Not GlowyLaptop 9d ago
I absolutely cannot stand listening to music while doing anything else. It exerts such a powerful magnetism over me that it's impossible for me to focus while it's playing, instrumental or not.
I don't get inspired to write by the "musical" part of music--that is, everything but the lyrics of a song. The sensations induced in me by music are of such a different class from the thoughts and emotions that go into writing that I might more accurately class "music trips" together with "drug trips" in my mind. It's an often enjoyable experience, but not one that could be usefully "translated" into anything but music, especially not human language. Lyrics, on the other hand, can and do lead me to write, like inspiring like. Or rather, I often get piqued by thoughtless lyrics and incorporate elements into my writing demonstrating what the result would be of taking them seriously when in a lucid frame of mind.
By the way, Rachmaninoff is said to have felt similarly; he strenuously denied that the Prelude in C# was supposed to "represent" being buried alive, or anything else, for that matter.
All that notwithstanding, I'll see if I can find some music to "misinterpret"--in the same way that Keats misinterpreted the Grecian urn (see Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism)--so as to have something to write for the exercise. I'll leave another comment if so.