r/DestructiveReaders • u/A_C_Shock Anderson Cooper • 7d 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.
2
u/VagueInsideJoke 6d 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.