Thursday, April 18, 2013

Make Creative Playlists -- Post 100!

I started my blog a little less than two years ago. By some strange fluke, I reached the same number of posts in 2011 as I did in 2012—exactly 33. This is my 34th post for 2013, which means two things: 1, it marks me officially making 2013 the year in which I finally am hitting my stride with my blog, and 2, this means that this is my 100th post! Thank you to all of you, and to all my new followers as well. I'm tempted to run a giveaway, perhaps at the end of A-Z, as a thank you, so stay tuned! 

On to A-Z: I mentioned earlier this month that I'm a little intimidated by people who have playlists for their books. I'm not sure where the fad came from, but it seems these days every author has a list of songs that inspired her for different sections of the book.

But while I can't always find a one-to-one correlation between parts of my story and particular songs, I do find that often it can be useful to put together music that inspires. For instance, I have a "cleaning" playlist, which my friends point out really is more of a "songs I can sing at the top of my lungs" kind of list. And even though I do most of my writing to Bach, I have a playlist that contains six CDs worth of music.

So if you're a music person, think about putting some of the music that inspires you into a single list. iTunes is probably the easiest and most familiar tool for this (and its purchasing features are great for instant gratification), but did you know you can also create playlists on YouTube? Gather a bunch of songs you like, and place them in a playlist to run end-to-end. It's a great way to explore music without necessarily springing for the whole album. Online streaming services like Pandora and Spotify can serve up a genre of music that inspires you as well.

And if you need specific inspiration, the YA Misfits run a weekly feature about the music that inspires them, and Operation Awesome frequently run posts about good writing music as well.

Do you use a playlist? And if you do, is it the music or the lyrics that you attend to in deciding which songs go on the list? Do you write to specific genres of music? Are you an instrumental-only person?

This month I'm participating in the A-Z blog challenge. My theme is "writer hacks," or 26 shortcuts you can do as a writer to get the most out of writing and the journey toward and through publication. Find out more about it at a-to-zchallenge.com, and hop around to read the other cool blogs that are part of the challenge! 

2 comments:

  1. I don't have a playlist for my novel, I have never heard of it before. I know of one or two authors who have a 'book trailer' a mini film, and I like the idea. :-)

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