Your Writing Environment: Sound

"The Color of Sound: Fingerstyle Jazz Guitar" by Gene O'neill
CD cover image by Tom M Franklin

I've been thinking about writing environments lately.  This could be because I don't really have a set writing environment -- well, to be honest, I do have a room that's supposed to be dedicated to my writing (it's even named after the main character in my I'm-Taking-This-Way-Too-Seriously novel).  The problem is, that room is way too messy, with books, boardgames, clothes and music all over the place.  Besides, I've found that I prefer typing on my laptop as opposed to a desktop keyboard...

Anyway, let's just say that I do most of my writing either in bed, on the couch or at the dining room table.

In Kiersten White's humorous "18 Easy Steps to Becomming a Writer" (found over at Chuck "How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack" Sambuchino's Guide to Literary Agents site) she writes the following:

Step Seven: Realize you need music. Spend the next hour finding the perfect "mood" music for what you want to write.

This tied in quite well with something I'd been giving some thought to lately.

When I'm doing my 40-hour a week werk gig I tend to have a steady stream of music playing through iTunes or Pandora.  My iTunes playlist is a diverse mix of 80s alternative/new wave, ambient/new age, acoustic fingerstyle guitar (including my copy of Gene's CD, of course), gregorian chant, classical, celtic, blues, (what my friend Jaime called) Loud, Fast Stuff, and some TV theme songs and Tom Lehrer thrown in for good measure).

When I'm writing, however, it's a different story altogether.  (Heh. Get it?)  When I'm working on Draft Zero it really needs to be silence.  No music or TV in the other room, no sounds other than maybe the white noise of a fan.  My mind is too frayed trying to stay quiet enough to listen to the voices in my head so I can write down their words.  If I need to drown out the TV in the other room, I have earbuds and a number of heard-so-many-times-I-can-almost-not-hear-them pieces of ancient acoustic music (renaissance lute and guitar) and some equally familiar recorded Hearts of Space  episodes.

When I'm editing (Draft One through Draft Okay-Send-This-Thing-Out), I'm okay with instrumentals -- new age/ambient music, acoustic fingerstyle guitar (hi, Gene-o!) and any one of a multitude of lesser-heard HOS episodes. I'm still trying to listen to the words as I say them in my head, so any music with its own words is in competition for my headspace and gets skipped over right away.


-- Tom

p.s.  Don't forget -- you have one more week to enter to win an autographed copy of Alicia Bessette's "Simply from Scratch"!  I'll be picking a winner one week from Tuesday.  Just click through the link above and (a) follow my blog and (b) leave a comment at end of the entry.  Really, it's that simple!

Playing With Your Characters

When In Doubt, Post Another
Picture of a Cute Cat

This week is being taken up by line edits of the current WIP.  My goal is to have them marked up by the end of the weekend and completed in my laptop by sometime next week.  Then, I send copies off to my beta readers to review while I studiously work on a good query to have ready for WriteOnCon (August 10 - 12.  You DO know about WriteOnCon, don't you?)

Meanwhile, let's talk about gemstones and jewelry for a moment, shall we?

My wife is a goldsmith and a jeweler.  One day each year, in the late winter months, she takes out all of her gemstones and spends a day with them.  She will arrange them in various combinations, moving them around and staring at them for long periods of time.

We refer to this as her "playing with her stones."  

I've come to appreciate the time she spends like this, designing her pieces.  By the end of the day she has a dozen or new designs sketched out, some on paper, others just in her head.  She saves the separate sets of stones in their own plastic cases and then can't wait to get started making each piece.


When it comes to writing, I'm a character-driven writer.  I start with a character who sparks my interest and explore what makes that character so interesting.  I'll spend time with that character, talking to them and letting them talk through me. (allowing them to become some of The Voices In My Head)

Sometimes, when I'm talking with a character I'll find out what they do that's so interesting (or trying not to do) or their particular circumstances.  If not, I start dropping them in absurd, difficult situations and seeing what they do.  This not only shows me how they might react to different events, but also gives me some ideas on what problems would make for an engaging plot to feature them in.

When it comes down to it, I'm doing much the same thing with my characters that my wife does when she plays with her stones.  My characters may sparkle in the sunlight* but they are being taken out and examined, put into different settings and contrasted with other characters to discover how they might best be put on display.

So play with your characters!  They should be fun to work with--and they're certainly cheaper per karat than gemstones.


 -- Tom

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*No, this is not a Twilight reference.  This is a faceted gemstone reference.  Who ever heard of a sparkling vampire?  They're blood-sucking demons, not Champagne.  Geez...

For the Record and For When I Forget

Not to jinx anything, but...

For the past two (three? four?) weeks I've sat, diligently, staring at my computer screen during the evenings.  My WIP has been open and I'm at the end of the document -- you know, that place where the rest of the story needs to be typed out.

And I've stared.  And stared.

It's not like I didn't know what came next -- I did.  It's not as if the next scene was particularly tricky or nuanced or needed a different POV or anything like that.  I knew what my characters were going to do, my characters all agreed that, yes, that is exactly what they would do, all I had to do was bang on the right keys and get the words into the document.

Only they would not come.

Oh, sure, I pecked out a handful of words each night.  Stilted, angular words with elbows and knees sticking out all over the place.  Uncomfortable words that formed even more uncomfortable sentences.

In between watching episodes from the complete DVD collection of Daria* and The Amazing Race Asia † I wondered what had happened to me as a writer?  My WIP is a humorous, Steampunkish adventure whose characters have very clear and distinct voices.  Writing them is easy.  In fact, while ago when an old friend asked on Facebook commented on  how difficult it was to write comedy, I answered

i just write what the voices in my head say.

then i clean it up in during the edits.

But where had those voices gone?  They sure weren't talking to me.  Even when I tried to engage one of the main characters in a conversation, there was nothing.  My characters had simply stopped talking to me.

After a long Saturday of not writing much of anything useful for the story (and doing a spectacular nose-dive into the wallowing end of the self-pity pool) I woke up on Sunday feeling much better about things.  I have no idea what changed, but something had tangibly changed.  And when I sat down at the laptop, I picked up the story right where I had left off and suddenly found myself Back in the Groove.  My characters were speaking to me again!  They dictated the dialog, I typed it in and filled in the descriptors.  The action moved right along, problems became bigger, reactions more telling of the characters.

The side of my left arm started itching and I knew I had some anti-itch lotion in the bedroom, but getting it would have meant getting up from the laptop and leaving the story.  After so many weeks of nothing, I wasn't going to risk losing that Groove for a stupid itch.  (I ended up scratching it so much that a co-werker looked at me on Monday and said, "What happened to your arm?")

Two thousand plus words later and some editing on a chapter section I could stitch into the current version from the old, discarded version later, I went to bed.

Yesterday, after getting home from werk and watching an SNL All Commercials show (thanks to streaming Netflix) I sat back down and banged out another 500 words, stitched and edited the leftover chapter segment into the story and dove into the next chapter.

The only problem with The Groove is that when I hit it my mind doesn't stop racing.  That river keeps right on flowin' and it's all I can do to keep afloat and type fast enough to keep up.  Unfortunately, when I do have to stop -- for things like sleep so I can go off and do that Steady Paycheck and Health Benefits daytime job -- my brain doesn't get the message to head for dry land for quite a while.  Half an  hour after I'd gone to bed I got up again to scribble some quick notes for the remainder of the chapter I'd stopped in the middle of earlier.

Undoubtedly, I'll lose the way into the Groove again and be moping around, certain that I'm just kidding myself that I'll ever be able to write a good story, much less be published.  Hopefully, I'll remember to take a look at this entry and remember that writing is a marathon, not a sprint, even if the rush of the Groove makes it feel that way sometimes.


-- Tom



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* Having seen only the occasional episode of Daria when it first aired, I've been disappointed to see how the second season wasn't quite as consistent as the first and how by the third season it had jumped the shark.  (That shark jump came well before the introduction of Tom as Jane's boyfriend.  I'd spot the Official Daria Jump as the hideous All Singing episode early in season three)

† Hard to believe it's taken me eleven entries before making an Amazing Race reference.  I watch very little television these days but The Amazing Race is a notable exception.  I'm one of those TAR junkies who has applied to the show numerous times.