I enjoy music, but I wouldn’t consider myself the type of person who needs to be inundated with music all day long. You definitely wouldn’t see me going about my life’s business, an IPod headphone perpetually in my ear like all the teenagers. (Boy, I sound old). To date myself further, I don’t even own an IPod. I listen in the car, I listen if I need some auditory stimulation, but besides that, I can take it or leave it.

However, as I’m plotting out my new contemporary, I find that it is more musically charged than the Regency I’ve lost interest in (for now). Different plot aspects get me humming some song or another and making thematic parallels to music.

I find this a little disconcerting because it did NOT happen while I was working on my last WIP. And I’m wondering if that isn’t why my last WIP started feeling so stiff and dead as I worked into the dreaded middle of it. It lacked that emotion, the feeling that I know, from my experience as a reader, that other readers want.

It isn’t just any song that I think of when I’m working my new WIP. I realized my earlier statement sounded like every time I opened the lid on my computer that I was swallowed into the Sound of Music or something. No, that isn’t it. Instead, there are a few songs that I think of when I’m writing. I think of them as the soundtrack of this book.

So far, there are three songs clanking around in my brain when I work on this novel: “Forgive” by Rebecca Lynn Howard, “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon, and “I Apologize” by One Republic. Amazingly, anytime I find myself stuck for an idea, I just have to listen to one of these songs and I’m immediately back into my WIP, full of the emotions I want to encapsulate, and ready to get to work again.

Does your work have a soundtrack? And if so, what songs can you find on it? Does music play a role in your writing and if so, what role?

As an aside, I attempted to load a couple of those songs in here, but I’m video upload incompetent. Apologies. But, they’re all on YouTube, if you’re interested.