Music and Writing (Part 4)

Music inspired a lot of the ideas behind my first few attempts at novels. Mostly, I think, because I took regular five-hour train rides to New Jersey to see the guy I’m now married to. I went through a lot of cd’s (yep, I’m old) on those train rides, while I was crocheting an afghan I still haven’t finished, or staring out the window, or writing the story that later became my first novel.

All the daydreaming from those trips spun off a lot of story ideas. At the time, I would listen to the same music while I wrote, even singing along with the words.

I no longer have those long train rides. They turned into drives, which meant I couldn’t slip fully into idea-generation land, and then thankfully disappeared entirely. Somewhere along the way, I got my first mp3 player, and walking and then jogging replaced traveling as my main inspiration time. I don’t make soundtracks for books any more, though. The ideas are constantly morphing–that’s why I started writing them down–so a song that sparked one story last winter might mean something entirely different this fall. I don’t even listen to music while I write most of the time. Maybe because I don’t have those long trips to let it sink into my brain so it distracts me from writing rather than fading into the background.

Sometimes I miss those early train rides, but I’m glad to have traded them for a few steps down the hall to my own living room.