I've read a LOT of blog posts about music and how it affects writing. How songs can inspire plot lines. How music from a certain band can inspire the whole mood of a book.
How having a playlist for the book and songs for specific scenes can instantly transport you to the mind frame you need to be in to write. How some people map out their entire book through songs.
There's even a cool website called
Stereomood where you can select an emotion, and it will play music to help you
feel that emotion.
Logically, I GET IT. It makes perfect sense. It sounds like a fabulous way of writing! I read those posts, and want to map out my book in song. I wonder why I haven't ever done it before.
Then I finally realized why I never do that.
It just plain doesn't work for me. I
don't listen to music when I write. For every scene I write, there is
not a song tied to it. I
don't have a band that inspires my MS. Music does
not play a huge part in writing for me.
Assuming I'm not the only one, I came up with a theory.
Strong audio people are crazy inspired by music;
strong visual people are crazy inspired by images.
I have read a LOT of blog posts about images, too. Some of us search through picture after picture of actors to find one that represents our MC before we even start writing.
Some of us find pictures of our setting, and other times the setting pictures reside only in our heads, because there doesn't exist a picture that could do it justice, and we lack the drawing/painting skills to put the image to paper.
Some of us draw their characters. (Not me, but I am totally jealous of those who have the skill.)
Some of us draw out a scene, placing everyone where they should be, no matter how unprofessional the scratches on paper are.
Some of us map out our book with images-- either drawn or by finding images through Google, making a storyboard of sorts.
Sometimes an image of scenery can spawn an idea for an entire book.
When I work through my story, I think it would go so much better if I could just get a really long piece of paper and visually plot out the book! I haven't quite figured out the perfect way to do it, but when I do, it will be epic. And when I find my epic method, I'll be sure to share with all my fellow visually-inspired writers. (If you've already figured this out, you'll share your secret with me, right?)
So there's my theory. Either we're strongly inspired by what we hear, or we're strongly inspired by what we see. Or possibly we're somewhere near the middle and use a combination of the two. Where do you stand?
.
