Music & the Writer

4 min readOct 18, 2012

photo of classical music advertisement for epic music and great battle scenes

I snapped this pic in Chicago, Dec 2011, because music matters.

Lots of writers use music to set mood and evoke emotion while writing, and I’m no exception — I love using music to create a tone for a scene or even just to get creative juices flowing.

Some authors have gone so far as to release playlists, identifying songs for each scene. I don’t generally do that, for several reasons:

I don’t work that way

That’s just not how my brain works; I don’t often have a specific piece of music tied to a specific scene. There are very rare exceptions.

I don’t have permission

When I do actually have a specific soundtrack for a scene, I generally don’t have the artist’s permission to use it publicly. Most don’t mind the mention, but occasionally their label’s lawyers feel differently. I know of several incidents where an artist was fine with or even flattered by a non-commercial use of a song (including one in which the user was personal friends with the artist), but the label issued a C&D letter.

And referencing a song in relation to my own work for sale might be considered commercial use. Still fuzzy on how a court would view a writer specifically tying a work for sale to someone else’s work for sale, and I’ll let someone else go first, thanks.

So while I may know that the first time Morgan sees Rae dance (in a work called Kingcraft, not available at this time or any time soon), she’s dancing to “Marco Polo” by Loreena McKennitt, I don’t always want to share that. But legal concerns aren’t the only reason, either.

Readers don’t always work that way, either

Now that I’ve mentioned “Marco Polo,” give it a listen.

Some readers thought that was a lovely song. Others were wholly unmoved. Still others were distracted by the visuals and forgot to listen to the music.

If I specify a piece of music for a certain scene, but that music doesn’t work for the reader, I may have actually hurt their reading experience by replacing their own imagined soundtrack.

(By the way, there’s a really interesting article/podcast on music and emotion over at How Stuff Works.)

Scenes & Soundtracks

Now obviously films get around this end-user issue all the time — but they have talented composers writing specifically for that medium. It’s created for the scene itself and it’s timed perfectly. Books don’t have those advantages.

Still, if Howard Shore ever scores one of my books — squeeeeeeeeeeee! — I would be totally okay with that.

Mood & Music

So how do I use music while writing?

I have a playlist called, accurately enough, Angsty & Epic Writing Music. It’s several dozen hours of mostly instrumental music, chosen for sweeping emotions, driving rhythms, and general awesomeness. I use it to ease my brain — which both responds to music and now recognizes it as a cue — into epic writing mode. It’s as close as I get to having Howard Shore scoring my work.

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So what’s on it? Lots of things, but here are a few staples:

Epicon, by Globus
Trailerhead, and just about anything else by The Immediate Music Company (Globus by another name)
The Extended Lord of the Rings Recordings, by Howard Shore
Invincible, by Two Steps from Hell
Loreena McKennitt
Tron: Legacy soundtrack, by Daft Punk
Smile?, by The Crystal Method
Taku Iwasaki’s soundtrack to the Rurouni Kenshin OVA, released in the US with the unfortunate title of Samurai X
the Myst and Riven soundtracks, by Robyn Miller