Sunday, October 4, 2009

what you hear

What do you listen to when you write?

I can't listen to anything when I'm working. I need only silence and white noise: coffee brewing, a rooster outside, wind, stuff like that. If there are any human sounds like conversation, music, or (God forbid) a television going on anywhere detectable to me in my house I absolutely can not work.

This may be why I become so tyrannical in Stage Four.

I don't mean to suggest that I don't love to listen to music, because I do. In fact, I make up playlists of artists and albums that I enjoy listening to concurrently with my work on a particular project -- but never while I am actually sitting at the keyboard.

I thought about this because of a couple comments from friends to me on Facebook recently... and how I've been listening to a couple old albums by David Bowie quite a bit lately. Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs make a hell of a good playlist for me as I work on the final tweaks on The Marbury Lens because, like this book, the albums evoke such a grim sense of being lost in a future world that offers only passing moments of comfort.

So... how does music play a role in your writing process?