We often wonder what might have been in an author’s mind while writing his book. We don’t always imagine that it was Metallica. Or Charles Mingus. Or Mogwai. Or – as it was by chance or trend when writers were contacted about music and the process of writing – The Dubliners.
“I’m working on a script made up of a group of people who used to know and get back together, and I’ve actually listened to The Dubliners a lot,” says Roddy Doyle. “Thematically, it relates to the story and filled the room with an atmosphere.”
Sarah Crossan, who is writing the script adaptation of her latest novel Here Is the Beehive, has heard the band’s Carrickfergus version so many times that she barely hears it. Which is how she wants it.
Author Sarah Crossan. Photo: Dara Mac Dónaill / The Irish Time
“I’ll have a playlist of about 25 or 30 songs and just listen to it over and over. But then a certain song will speak to the book and I’ll only listen to it on repetition. Do you know when you hear a song so often that it only irritates you? It doesn’t irritate me. I can’t hear it. But it’s in the room, ”she says.
There are many writers who prefer to write in silence who can’t stand the intrusion of music and how they pull themselves into focus, triggering their rhythm, letting words and voices babble over their own thoughts.
And there are other writers who not only want to fill their heads with sound, but want to use the music to fill their work with the mood that is associated with it, to adjust the frequency and rhythm of their story, or simply for additional productivity to get out of themselves when they could otherwise lose weight.
Stephen King has previously spoken of heavy metal being his writing companion. Metallica. Anthrax. Never Ozzy Osbourne. Colson Whitehead writes to a playlist of about 2,000 songs. Electronic music, rap, punk. The Ramones were among those who punched him in the ears while he was writing The Underground Railroad. Gabriel García Márquez, meanwhile, once said that he had “worn out” his Beatles records while writing “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.
Create a space
This writer’s experience of writing music began with working on my first children’s novel The Daily Walk – often on the floor of a stuffed train wagon. The music created a space that did not physically exist and excluded voices, electronic announcements, the brake, and the shunt of the train itself. I would turn myself on so I could turn myself off.
Music later became a way to fill the silence that suddenly reigns when you step out of an office job into a work environment that consists largely of you and your own thoughts.
Perhaps surprisingly, Roddy Doyle did not write The Commitments while listening to music. “I thought you weren’t going to do that. It’s a distraction. “Bands only became work colleagues later and filled the silence of a day that had suddenly become much calmer.
Writer Roddy Doyle. Photo: Alan Betson / The Irish Times
“I went from a teacher in the company of tens or hundreds of people to being alone overnight. And it could be a very long day. “
He has a turntable that he picked up on adapting The Snapper for the Gate Theater a few years ago. “The snapper is very valuable to me. The book. The film. The whole experience. Everything about it. So I thought I’d indulge myself and bought a record player, not an expensive one, but I have that here and a growing collection of records. “
Doyle enjoys the “ritual” of getting up to change LPs. He also uses Spotify, which allows him to regularly discover new music and find the specific sounds that suit his work. The result is personal soundtracks for his books.
He connects Charles Mingus with his latest novel Love. “Don’t ask me why. I think it’s the rhythm. When I come in the afternoon I find something like Philip Glass, Charlie Mingus and Horace Silver. These people, there is a rhythm that helps me get another hour of work out of myself.
Jazz musician Charles Mingus 1974. Photo: AP Photo
“It gives the room an energy and gives me an energy. I’ve said it many times before, but Philip Glass’ Part Swap Music got me through A Star Called Henry. And when I did the follow up Oh, Play That Thing! Wrote, I opened up to a whole world of jazz that I had slammed before. “
Instrumental music
Instrumental works best for Doyle: post-rock, minimalist music, “a certain kind of jazz”. Talking to him about music quickly becomes a trade in referrals, a back and forth of “Did you hear?”
He listened to the cellist and composer Oliver Coates write short stories last year. A current favorite are the collaboration pledges Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and London Symphony Orchestra.
“I think there is definitely a link between music and productivity,” says Doyle. “I don’t know whether this is the rhythm that gets into the fingers and into the brain. It really is a bottle of Lucozade. “
Does Doyle listen to suit the tempo or mood of a particular chapter?
“Wear Luther Vandross for the equestrian scenes?” he laughs. “No.”
However, music offers a cross-project change when the environment doesn’t.
“If you move from completing one job to doing a completely different job, it makes perfect sense. I can’t uproot myself and go to another room. And I think that would be just plain stupid. But I can change my shirt and I can change the music. “
Literary Association
The youngest prizewinner Na nÓg Sarah Crossan also associates her books with certain songs. For Moonrise – about a young man whose brother is on death row – the song Natalie Merchants’ I May Know the Word was. She landed on it after realizing that Merchant was serial killer Aileen Wuorno’s favorite singer. the song Carnival played at her funeral.
Singer Natalie Merchant. Photo: Philip Ryalls / Redferns
“Sometimes I hear a song and it has the texture that I want to capture in this book,” she says. “In general, I think my books are about loneliness, the loneliness of the human condition. And that’s where I want to be when I write. And I have the playlists on Spotify, and when you texted me about it, I looked through them and thought, my god, they are all sad songs. No happy song among them.
“So for writing it’s a lot of music with wistful energy. And a lot of Irish music. Lots of folk music. “
Crossan often runs before writing – “because it’s about rhythm” – and as a writer of verse novels, she often listens to poetry while doing it. This combined to motivate their writing, even if the work itself is being done with music.
“I asked [songs] With so many repetitions, I stop hearing them. But somehow they create a feeling in the room. So it’s not like I’m writing an exciting scene that I put music on that I haven’t heard before that is exciting because that’s a massive distraction for me. “
Crossan tries not to take the work music with him all day, “because otherwise my life is just a series of sad moments. I have a running soundtrack and that’s stuff like George Ezra’s footloose and shotgun, very sticky stuff to jump to. So I have different soundtracks for different parts of my life, but not different parts of writing. “
Machining process
She turns off the music for editing when the loose flow of creating a story has to give way to a focus on every line, word, and space.
“If I was trying to work on the rhythm of the language and make sure the verse wasn’t sticky, then I would be working in silence. When I read the work in editing to myself, there is no music in the background. But on the first draft there will definitely be music that will be played very, very loud. To the point that it’s silent. I don’t know how to explain otherwise.
“Whatever the feeling I get from this song, that is the feeling I want the reader to have when they read the book. I play this song in a loop in the hope that the melody will find its way into work through the energy of the universe. “