The Writer's Guide to Creating a Playlist

*Originally published on 10/6/09



Most writers listen to music while they write. Writing is a frustrating task at times and music can help make the "shift" go by a bit easier. Writing is also helpful in getting creative juices flowing. It helps you tune out the world and escape into whatever you're writing.

Now obviously, your playlist is going to consist of bands or artists that you like, that's a no brainer. You have several strategies as far as choice goes.

You can go through and make your own playlist manually. You can cherry pick the songs that you either love hearing again and again or ones you just feel inspire you. You can also manage the length of the list to match however long you plan to write. Most writers set aside a block of time so you can create a playlist that lasts the entirety of this block. It will help you stick out the entire duration. You won't be constantly checking the clock as the music will tell you when you're done.

Others set their time spent writing, not on the hours, but on how much work you get done. If you write this way, creating a finite playlist is moot. You do have ways of going about creating a playlist for yourself.

The simplest way to go about this is to just put iTunes or Windows Media Player on shuffle and let your computer do the work for you. It's simple, effective and it doesn't take up a whole lot of time.

I, myself, tend to go a different route. I'll usually find one band with an extensive discography like Zeppelin or Nightwish and listen to them for the entire duration. Time tends to fly a bit faster when you're listening to one band en masse.

Using iTunes, you can also mix it up using the play count function. This will tell you how many times you've listened to a song and you can organize the songs accordingly. This gives you a good mix of variety as well as blocks of music by one particular artist.

The type of music you listen to can affect you're writing. I find that movie soundtracks are very conducive to writing. This works more for fiction than for article writing, but it can work for that too. It's especially great when the music syncs up to whatever scene it is you're writing. The sensation really is indescribable. It brings you into your own story that much more.

Some people listen to audiobooks as they write. I get how this could help, hearing other people's writing can help you get your own rhythm going, but I would think that it is difficult to focus on the work you're doing as well as focus on the book being read to you. People make it work, I just think it would lead to confusion.

I would not recommend writing to silence and using the television as background noise will do more harm than good. Listening to music is your best bet. It's actually one of the perks of the job. Most office jobs don't allow you to listen to music, so you should be happy to take advantage of the perk.