I have a terrible confession to make

Also, HIGHLY recommend the new Manchester Orchestra track as music to write to.

 

I’ve never been able to write with music, or anything really, on. I have the TV on in the background while I’m doing other work things during the one day a week I work from home, but once I have to write or edit something, I gotta mute.

 

I used to write to music very happily.

But I found sometimes I was mistaking the rattle and bounce of the music for the rattle and bounce of my own writing. Over the years I stopped writing to music with lyrics. Eventually I turned the music off altogether.

It's a very personal process, of course, and we all do it differently. When I have students, I tell them they'll figure out their own version of it.

 

I can't write at all with music playing.

 

Cosign both music during organizational activities, and Sinatra as the grade-A American soundtrack to it.

 

60,027 words. Two-thirds mark.

*Pete Weber crotch chop*

 

One semester when there was too much furniture creaking on the floor above me - ahem - and I had some concert reviews to write for a music class, I put on a pair of studio headphones and got ahead in that class by putting together every review needed for the semester.

Also figured that I usually write better with music. After getting quotes down as needed for written pieces, of course ...

 

SAM!!!

 

HC!!!

 

Welcome home, son.

 

At the shop, and a woman sitting next to me gestures for me to take off my headphones and then asks me what I'm doing.

"I'm a writer. I'm writing. I was writing."

Blah blah blah, she tells me she's a writer, too. She points at the note pad in front of her as evidence. I look down at it.

I shit you not, the sum total of her's day work, in giant letters, was: "I am the most wonderful person I have ever met."

Headphones went back on in record time. God bless Dr. Bose.