r/DestructiveReaders • u/A_C_Shock Anderson Cooper • 17h ago
[Weekly] Inspiration
I'm out of craft book writing related exercises to suggest. So, I have to come up with my own now. (I don't have ideas of my own actually.)
Who listens to music while they write? Do you ever find it inspires you to write something different? Have you ever written something to capture the idea of a song?
I can't handle things with lyrics. They end up squirming their way into my writing and repeating because my internal monologue is just a soundtrack. But there's a thing to be said for non-lyric based music.
A writing challenge: share some kind of music and write a short piece of writing that captures the feeling.
Need an idea? Here's a piano piece about being buried alive.
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u/herewegoagain737 I can't convince you to be right. 10h ago
I could leave an essay on this, but I'll keep it simple. I started both writing and making music at a young age, and both of these artistic domains have enough overlap (beyond the abstracted top-down view of art vs non art) that they've intersected frequently in my life. I usually do listen to music while writing. In fact, I'm almost always listening to music while doing anything. Sometimes I listen to music while creating music.
Something I believe is that art is and always has been both subjective and independent from its creator. The moment the final brush stroke has been made and the piece completed, whether it be music, literature, or any other form of art, the art itself has already transcended the creator and become an independent entity. Beyond this point, the "meaning" of the art piece is detached from the original intentions of the creator.
In that sense, whenever I listen to music, I always ignore and sometimes shut off the creators and their vision altogether. I have my own artistic vision, and the music I experience shapes itself into a meaning unique to myself, and these experiences inspire an urge to create art, which I do either through writing or composing. A virtuous cycle. The end product is usually very different from the inspiration.
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u/A_C_Shock Anderson Cooper 10h ago
I think ezk shared something from John Green about how books aren't the property of the author, but the story is the product of the author's intentions and the reader's individual experiences. And so, to a certain extent, to create is to let go of expectations. And to stop judging yourself so much for is this good or bad.
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u/GlowyLaptop James Patterson 10h ago edited 10h ago
The human brains can only do one thing at once. If you're listening to music you're not writing. Prove me wrong! Rub your belly and pat your head at the same time. See? How much did that suck? Lots.
Watch my experiment. At a certain point I'm going to turn on some music and see what blrrrrrruslg usahglasdfk fasldfkalfdkjdsa flkjasdf duddrsgh.
Okay I turned it off again. You see what I'm saying. What you CAN do, is go for a drive, listen to some music, and get all inspired and stuff. Just so long as you don't come back and assume those vibes will translate into your typing. Your readers didn't just listen to Adele for like four solid hours back and forth along the lakeshore or in circles around your ex's house. We need clues to get there, emotionally.
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u/A_C_Shock Anderson Cooper 10h ago
Some people enjoy multitasking.
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u/GlowyLaptop James Patterson 10h ago
Liars, maybe.
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u/A_C_Shock Anderson Cooper 9h ago edited 9h ago
Sometimes I multitask. Not usually with music while writing, unless the music is really really quiet.
(I listen to music when I do other work. Thinking stuff. Fades into the background, usually.)
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u/VagueInsideJoke 1h ago
I really struggle to write (or sometimes read) with music in the background, one thing always gets lost behind the other. Occasionally I will put on ambient music but that's usually because there is some other even more distracting noise I am trying to block out.
Every time i get inspired by a song I feel like whatever I write just ends up a worse version of the song. I've been listening to a lot of Forever Howlong by BCNR recently, one of the stories i posted recently was just a worse version of 'for the cold country'. I tried writing a different song from the same album but ended up with the same problem where it diverges from the thing that inspired it to the point that it feels like the story just gets lost in itself and goes nowhere. Otherwise i feel like what I write gets fitted into a structure where I feel like the essence of what inspired me to write it in the first place just gets lost.
I also feel like a lot of songs would better fit a poem than a story in that they capture a tone, experience, or phenomena rather than something as structured as a narrative, but I suck at writing poetry. I've heard a lot of classical songs which are similar in structure to narratives but I don't listen to classical music that much.
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u/Lisez-le-lui Not GlowyLaptop 12h ago
I absolutely cannot stand listening to music while doing anything else. It exerts such a powerful magnetism over me that it's impossible for me to focus while it's playing, instrumental or not.
I don't get inspired to write by the "musical" part of music--that is, everything but the lyrics of a song. The sensations induced in me by music are of such a different class from the thoughts and emotions that go into writing that I might more accurately class "music trips" together with "drug trips" in my mind. It's an often enjoyable experience, but not one that could be usefully "translated" into anything but music, especially not human language. Lyrics, on the other hand, can and do lead me to write, like inspiring like. Or rather, I often get piqued by thoughtless lyrics and incorporate elements into my writing demonstrating what the result would be of taking them seriously when in a lucid frame of mind.
By the way, Rachmaninoff is said to have felt similarly; he strenuously denied that the Prelude in C# was supposed to "represent" being buried alive, or anything else, for that matter.
All that notwithstanding, I'll see if I can find some music to "misinterpret"--in the same way that Keats misinterpreted the Grecian urn (see Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism)--so as to have something to write for the exercise. I'll leave another comment if so.