Music for Writing To

Music has become a vital part of my writing process this year. A friend I meet with regularly about the project counseled me last month about the use of music in writing saying that several of his friends don't write while listening to music because they don't want the emotion they're feeling to come from the music, but from what's happening in the story. I find, however, in our small studio apartment that I need a pair of headphones to block out the world around me and make a safe, isolated, creative workspace for myself.

Of course, the kind of music I put on is crucial to creating the right kind of creative workspace. I've tried all kinds of genres from jazz (The Bad Plus) to post-rock (Bell Orchestre, Clogs) to film scores (Amelie, The Fountain), all of which I enjoy listening to, but for the purpose of my writing I find it all too driving and excitable to help put me in the relaxed state I need to be in to do good work. The music has to be quiet, calm, meditative, rolling, atmospheric, repetitive, moving, and emotional, simple in its instrumentation, and it can never have lyrics or the words distract me from the words I'm working to put down. So that's led me to using almost exclusively neoclassical (or post-classical) albums to write. It's generally piano driven, with strings, recorded ambient or source sounds, and the occasional electronic addition. It started with discovering Ólafur Arnalds on All Song's Considered and was quickly followed by Max Richter through, if I remember correctly, iTunes's recommendation engine. Those two will remain among my all-time, I'll listen to them forever, favorites, but it's grown over the last two years to include the following list of ten artists and thirty albums I give you now:

• Dustin O'Halleran - Piano Solos, Piano Solos Vol 2, Lumiere, & Vorleben
• Hauschka - The Prepared Piano, Room to Expand, & Ferndorf
• Jean-Yves Thibaudet - Satie: The Magic of Satie
• Jóhann Jóhannsson - IBM 1401 A User's Manual, Englabörn, & Fordlândia
• Jonsí - Riceboy Sleeps, We Bought a Zoo
• Matthew Robert Cooper - Miniatures, Some Days Are Better Than Others
• Max Richter - The Blue Notebooks, Songs From Before, & 24 Postcards in Full Color
• Ólafur Arnalds - Eulogy for Evolution, Dyad 1909, Found Songs, ...and they have escaped the weight of darkness, & Living Room Songs
• Peter Broderick - Float, Music for Falling from Trees, Docile, & Music for Confluence
• Philip Glass - Solo Piano, Glassworks, & The Hours

It's music that realigns my soul. It gets me to sit and stare at the page every morning for the two hours I've carved out for writing. It's a familiar friend providing just the right amount of distraction to get me past my discomfort of those first thirty minutes of not knowing what to write and trust the process that something will come today.

Imply Don't Show

I took the script of the project from a spare 25 notecard second draft up to 37 notecards yesterday, bringing in additional notecards from my first draft, filling in between existing scenes, and trying to create a more dramatic story arc: one of the characters searching for a girlfriend to no avail and the other couple easing into a physical relationship gradually and the things they argue about. In the process I realized that I’ve been writing these moments in a representational style once again, a criticism leveled against the pictures I’ve made thus far that I agree with strongly; I’ve been saying since the holidays that I need to make pictures that are more expressive of the moment between two characters, what it is to feel and be in that moment, than the representational approach of: here this is exactly what happened. And I know the approach I use, asking myself what the next story beat is and then showing that moment happening, is the cause.

As I was going through iTunes yesterday adding music back onto my laptop I came across bluegrass mandolin player Chris Thile’s instrumental song ‘Club G.R.O.S.S.’ (a mandolin/saxophone duet no less!). Thile said that when he was writing the song he would hear in his head the next note of the melody and then intentionally chose instead the note to either side of what sounded in his head like the “correct” note. It’s a completely unsingable melody as a result, but really compelling for it as well. And I was thinking about some of the shots I did in December of one of the characters lying in bed with a girl late at night while she sleeps (or he; we did it both ways) and realized that the way I’m writing my notecard bullet points for the story is to show the story beat that seemed like it need to be communicated: the characters meeting for the first time, the characters falling in love over dinner, the characters trying to pickup someone at a bar, the characters drunkenly hooking up. Those moments as written would make images we would look at and know instantly what’s going on in them and that’s because I’m showing exactly what happened in the scene (this is what I mean by representational rather than expressive). I need to take a cue from Club G.R.O.S.S. and write out the moments in the story that are currently offscreen, that happen on either side of the moments I’ve already chosen and shoot those instead, because the moments to either side imply what happens without showing it like all the offstage action in Shakespeare’s plays that’s more graphic because we have to visualize it for ourselves. So forget the storyteller’s dictum, show don’t tell, I need to imply don’t show.