How To Keep Your Motivation For Writing High With Music

Hey everyone! I’m excited to be here for the second stand-alone post for this month. I think that this topic is fun to write about and so I’m excited to finally share it with you. I hope that you enjoy.

How To Keep Your Motivation For Writing High With Music

Writing is hard. If no one has ever said this to you or if you have never thought it, then you aren’t doing writing right. Writing is hard even if you have great skill or talent. And as is often the case for people when we come across hard things, its often difficult to get up the motivation to write or to continue writing. One of the few things I have found universally helps writers write is music. What kind of music, how you play it, or when you use it varies from writer to writer. In this post I want to suggest just a few possibilities of how to use music to motivate yourself to write.

Writing a Scene to a song

One of the first pieces of advice I want to give for using music to keep your motivation high is to write a scene to a song. I’ve seen lots of different versions of this from all sorts of different writers. I’ve also seen artists do something similar where they will paint something based off of a song they listen to on repeat. How you do this activity varies. I personally do this activity, usually with an instrumental piece of music. I usually write a story that matches the feeling I get from the music, not necessarily the name or the sound. I’ve heard of a writer who does this activity by writing a scene or story based off of the lyrics of a song. I’ve heard of screenwriters who write scenes to lyrical music as warmups before they begin working on their most recent work.

No matter what kind of music you use or what kind of style you write in you can always find a way to write something to music. I think what makes these less nerve wracking for me is that writing a scene to music is more of a warmup. You don’t have to write it for a manuscript, for your most recent storyline, or even to show to anyone else. Sometimes your writing is simply for you and it’s a good way to express your ideas or concepts. I have hundreds of short scenes and meaningless quotes scattered throughout my files, walls, and computer. Some of them I’ve end up finding homes for and others I’ve never actually used anywhere but I like them because I wrote them for fun.

Making a music playlist for your book

I feel like this way of keeping your motivation high works both as a motivator and sometimes can be a distraction. Before I explain how this can motivate you, I want to point out that this does not mean that I’m suggesting spending forever listening to different kinds of music to find that perfect right song for your MC and then adding it to a playlist. No. I’m suggesting you make a list of songs (that you already know or that you hear later while writing) that remind you of your book or characters and put them in a playlist. These playlists can often motivate you by reminding you of why you like your book when you are so frustrated with it that you don’t like it at all. These music ideas are meant to motivate not distract.

I, being a person who likes to watch animatics but can’t draw to save my life, likes to take songs I’ve put into my playlist that remind me of my book to write short screenplays or animatic scripts to. These help me gather thoughts of my stories into cute formats that I enjoy, using the music that reminds me of my book. It also brings back that joy of the story that sometimes goes missing when you are writing the same story consistently over a long period of time. Other people listen to their book music on repeat while writing. Others listen to it while in the shower, hoping for new ideas. I had one friend who, when struggling with character motivation, would listen to her character songs until an idea came to her. Whatever way you do it, as long as you are motivating yourself with your playlist and not distracting yourself, this can be the perfect idea.

Finding genre music for your book

This is similar to the playlist for your book but what I mean here is that you should find genre specific instrumental music that remind you of your book genre. You could use this type of music when you are writing a current manuscript, when you need a new idea and you know what genre you want to write, or simply when you need something in the background while you think or write. There are a lot of places to get access to playlists people have already made. YouTube, Pandora, and Spotify are just some of the options out there for accessing, viewing and learning about other people’s genre-based music.

I always used a specific website when I was searching for genre-based music when I wasn’t using my book playlist. It’s called Soundfuel and it has all sorts of instrumental music all separated out by genre. Some of their genres get very specific like, atmospheric vocals, era: 1700’s – 1800’s, Asian epicness, and more. And the best part of Soundfuel is that they add more music and more playlists all the time. I’ve been using them for a couple years now and I never feel like I run out of music to listen to. (This is not sponsored; in case you were wondering. Haha.)

Whatever way you use it, music can be a very strong motivator for writing. People use all different kinds of music for all different kinds of writing and in a world where we can access music anytime we want from wherever we want, there is no lack for different varieties of music. And there isn’t a specific way that you need to use your music to be a motivated writer. Writers can motivate themselves in all sorts of different ways and in different forms using music. These The important part is that music is used as a motivator not a distraction from times when you are really trying to write.

I hope that this week’s post was helpful. I tried to give a few examples but I know that this is not all of the examples of how to use music as a writer. I had fun writing this post and I can’t believe we are only two posts away from the end of the year! Can you believe it?! Don’t forget to like, subscribe, become a blog page member, share, and follow me on social media. I hope that you can come back and enjoy next weeks post as well. And remember,

Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!