Nope, this is not me.

I saw a great blog post the other day about using music to motivate yourself to get off your butt and get out and exercise. That got me thinking about music and how I use it.

I frequently want to put myself into a certain frame of mind for writing. This doesn’t always mesh well with my everyday life. Some mornings my blood pressure is elevated after listening to a political discussion on the radio while I brush my teeth. (Don’t get me started on the us-versus-them game that passes for governing these days.)

Anyhow, when I sit down at my desk, the last thing on my mind is romance or any kind of warm fuzzies, but I need to write that next scene for the romance manuscript I’m working on.  Time to turn on my favorite love songs—Unchained Melody or I Need a Hero or Bridge Over Troubled Water—whatever song contains the emotion for the scene I want to write.

Is it love? You can see why I need the music.

What’s inside? Treasure or terror?

This is admittedly a whole lot harder when I’m working on a mystery. (Where are all the mystery songs? And what the heck would the lyrics be? Now my chipmunk brain is getting off track again—can I blame this on Twitter? Where did I put those nuts, anyway?) But even for mysteries, I can sometimes come up with music that expresses the emotions I want for the next scene, although it’s entirely possible I would get so involved in the search for an appropriate theme that I’d never get down to writing.

When smoke is coming out of my ears because a client or colleague  made my day miserable, I turn on New Age pieces—loons and water sounds and chimes mixed in with musical notes. After ten minutes or so, I’m so relaxed that I cannot believe that I was planning to flatten that person with my car in the parking garage.

Ready to brawl.

As a writer, I sometimes use energetic instrumental music to focus and get the creative juices going. I know some people can tune words out, but personally, I cannot listen to music with lyrics while I am trying to assemble words into a story. I can’t tune out those song words, and pretty soon I’m either inserting them into my chapter or thinking Now those are the dumbest lyrics I’ve ever heard or Why didn’t the songwriter use three actual syllables there instead of mangling that one-syllable word into three notes? Whatever.  My point is that my head is in the song, not in my book.

My Favorite Local Park

As a nature lover, I do not want music when I’m outdoors (unless it’s a concert, of course). I need to hear the wind rustling the leaves and the birds singing and the brook rushing and the bicyclist who is about to leave treadmarks up my spine. I’m always amazed by the joggers running by with their ears plugged by buds, not hearing the waterfall or even noticing the incredible owl sitting on the branch above the stream.

You’ll never find me unless you listen and look.

If I need to solve a plot problem, I need a walk outdoors sans music or conversation to mull over the issue. Sometimes the characters argue in my head, so it’s not always silent in there, but I hope it looks to others as if I’m in deep intellectual thought and not having a psychotic break.

Music shifts my brain from analytical to creative or recreational, but when I want or need to be in the moment, I need silence so I can observe and think things through and make decisions.

How about you?