Skip to main content

Musical mood

When I sit down to a few hours writing the first thing I do is plan what music I'm going to listen to while I work. 

It might be a bout of procrastination ahead of focusing but I find it incredibly difficult to write fluidly when all I can hear are my fingers stumbling across the keys.  If the man is on the sofa next to me then I'll have ear phones in but it's best when I'm alone and can put the stereo on with one artist's album influencing the tone of my mood and ultimately the energy of what is produced on the page.

I used to listen to a lot of Enya (seriously you can hear it in each page of every airy fairy thing I wrote at uni)because you can tune out quite fast to it. 

Then I tried to write to Counting Crows but they are my ultimate most favourite band in the world and that was a clear mistake.  I would often come to my senses around track 8 of 'August and Everything After' and realise that I'd been singing for the past 40 minutes and written absolutely nothing.

Recently it's Live that's been working for me.  They tend to start the song big and continue that way until a crashing end.  It kind of suits the dialogue that I'm chasing for the film-from-hell and also is too high for me to sing along to so no chance of me being sidetracked (true story, I have a typical man's range when it comes to vocals).

Anyway 'All Over You' keeps cropping up on my ipod and is what I will be listening to tonight when I tackle a new start to the first ten pages of my script. 

Rather brilliantly this is Live playing live.  Turn it up.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Happy Friday

This week has been hard. It seems to have just been one long downward spiral which should've meant I woke up this morning feeling beyond hope.  Especially after the 4am nightmare where I drowned and then woke up in a hot sweat. But I woke up a lot more cheerful than I have been all week.  It's freezing cold and the 2 mile walk to the office from Charing Cross was painful but I got in and have found myself smiling all day.  Smiling when a client meeting was cancelled even though I got here early to do a lot of printing for it.  Still smiling after I can't book any rooms for a few more meetings I've scheduled for my boss this afternoon.  And I'll hopefully still be smiling at 17:28 when something urgent happens as it has a habit of doing last thing on a Friday. This weekend I will be trying hard not to stress out about how many words I've written (0) or how many weeks I have left until the film from hell is to be pitched again (38) or when it has to be compl...

Chipping away

This week I've been concentrating on a TV pilot I've written as part of my Masters.  I had a tutorial on Tuesday where I walked aways with 2 pages of scribbled notes and a head full of ideas. I normally leave those meetings in a state of panic, never sure where to start or how to take an axe to a draft of work that has taken me weeks but now needs refinement.  I let the panic rage for 2 days but as always it's started to settle and today I'm looking at my pen pot of red biros and highlighters and wondering if I should just start tackling the great reshape.  The structure is almost there but the characters need condensing.  I need to cull at least 3 peripheral voices and make the survivors more distinct.  I need to cut my slug lines down from poetic theatrical essays to 2 lines of action.  I need a tagline (I should've had this before I started writing) and a definite genre - not the 3 that I'm interchanging at will....

Lullabies

It's been almost a year since I've written anything.  I handed in my completed script last June and graduated from my Masters in September. In the end I was really happy with it and had planned to make 2012 the year I became less professional EA and more full time writer. The event I didn't foresee was that the day I handed in my script was the evening I decided to take a pregnancy test and The Man and I discovered we were going to be parents in 9 months time. Which brings us to today.  More technically it takes us to tomorrow when I'm due to become a Mummy. I don't know why I haven't wanted to write anything in so long.  Maybe the film sapped it all out of me.  Maybe I've used this pregnancy as one big excuse to avoid thinking too hard. All I know is that when The Little One decides to arrive I'll be ready with lots of stories.  Tales of how the stars dangle in the sky and why the moon smiles down on Brighton pier.  Or how The Cat goes dancing e...