When you write, do you listen to music? For me, music playing low in the background when I’m writing really helps keep me settled – particularly in the Useless Hour that begins most sessions. But I can’t listen to anything too upbeat, and certainly nothing with lyrics else I start listening to them rather than the words wandering around in my head!

Recently, the West-End urchins have been using my TV cable as a swing/garotte so, this week, the aerial repairman came round to reattach it to the wall, hopefully out of their reach.

‘We’ll have to drill through there,’ he said pointing to the corner of the room where my Oxford English Dictionaries stood in a vertical and completely unusable pile. We moved them out into the hall which uncovered the footstool at the bottom – one of those with a little storage box. Inside, I found a whole bunch of old home-recorded cassette tapes.

The old cassette discovered this week. Tracklist: 'A Case of You,' Joni Mitchell; 'Getting There,' Bob Dylan; 'Cello Song,' Nick Drake; 'Suzanne' Leonard Cohen; 'Hey Jupiter,' - Tori Amos; 'After Halloween,' Sandy Denny and 'Bells For Her' Tori Amos.

In years gone by, I used cassettes extensively and, to be truthful, I have never quite recovered and adapted since their demise. I’d record scraps of songs, interviews with friends, radio shows… so I had a nostalgic few minutes shuffling through the tapes in the box, but one that particularly caught my eye went alongside a writing project from 10 years ago. It was the ‘soundtrack’ to the novel I’d been working on and like so many of us who have made cassettes for our friends, or burned CDs, or shared playlists, it simply compiled a selection of songs and pieces of music, but here chosen to reflect the novel in some way.

Some songs were connected very much to particular characters, others with the location, others with atmosphere I wanted to create or particular events – some I’d even imagined were playing in the background of the scenes themselves, on the character’s stereos for instance.

It’s all good fun, making a compilation, and that is an end in itself, but there are potential benefits to your writing too. Rather like the maps in Wordspark #003, it gets you thinking about your story in different dimensions, and gets you using different senses. For you to be able to say that a particular song evokes a particular character requires judgements to be made about their tastes, their culture, their passions and philosophies, their unexpected quirks and so on, and soon you get a fuller ‘feel’ for your character, and I say ‘feel’ because music so often works on an intuitive, emotional level, just as does our understanding of characters.

Some days, with the best will in the world, the words don’t want to come, so why not take the pressure off for half-an-hour and make yourself a compilation that you can then listen to. You can put yourself in the mood before writing, rather like lighting candles before taking a bath. The music ponders along in the background and in your sub-conscious as you write.

However, it needn’t just be background music. Say you are stuck with a certain scene. Try to imagine your story playing out like a film in your head. What music would most richly compliment what is happening? If you think of something, dig it out and have a listen, maybe put in on loop and, giving yourself a few moments to get immersed in the atmosphere of the music, begin to write.

Or, play the song through once and have a free-writing session. Lots of songs are between 3 and 5 minutes long, which makes them ideal for little bursts of writing. What do you think of when you listen to the piece? How does it connect to your writing project or, if you’re starting something new, imagine this song is playing in the background of a scene where what is unfolding is, for the people involved, very, very important…

Tags: cassettes, Dictionaries, Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, Tori Amos, Useless Hour, West End Urchins, Wordsparks! Free writing exercises.

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