Cathy: Music to soothe the savage breast

In eons past, before the advent of my own set of children in my life, listening to music was a huge part of my writing process. What kind I listened to affected the mood of what I wrote. What mood I wrote in was enhanced by the music I would pop into my tape player — boom box of old. Now, my kids are noisy, especially my young S. His is a world of noisemaking used to cope with the onslaught of noise the world makes and which he finds difficult to walk through without making his own to tune out the rest. Therefore, whenever I have time to myself (ha-ha), over the last several years since his noisemaking started, I have bathed myself in quiet.

In working on my longer project again, I have rediscovered that music can be a great influence on the writing, and very inspiring. I find my main character’s mother is and hums Mozart’s “A Little Night Music.” His father is Dave Brubeck’s “Take 5” or “Modern Jazz Quartet, In Concert.” Years ago, when I started writing this book, I was listening to Miles Davis’s “A Kind of Blue.” Now my main character walks his dog to Shubert’s “Trout Quintet.” Sometimes I poke around the internet for jazz or acoustic folk and rock selections on college radio webcasts or streaming audio, whatever the correct term is. Thinking about what I listen to for writing has made me very curious to know what you all may be listening to, or not when you are creating. So I’d like to propose a conversation:

What do you listen to when you are creating? How does what you are listening to affect your creativity?