xxxvii - Day 07 - Do you listen to music when you write? What kind? How do you relate music to your writing?

Yes, but not always. Generally speaking, the earlier in the process and the less solid my ideas for whatever I'm writing, the more likely it is that I'll be listening to something while I write.

In the early, purely creative stages of writing, chances are good that I'll play something that mirrors the feel of the scene/section I'm trying to write. I'm not sure if I'm actually projecting what I feel onto the page, but at the very least, I find having the music primes me to write the kind of scenes I want to be writing. So, the writing may not capture my frame of mind, but I'm in the right frame of mind to write. With the amount of press given to vanquishing The Blank Page, I figure any strategy that helps me put down words is a good strategy.

As I move along in the process, the less likely I am to press play, until, sometime before final edits are underway, I'm not listening to anything other than the sound of my fingers on the keyboard. Music isn't a distraction at that point, but I'm working other parts of my brain, more careful and considered parts, having sound on in the background would be at best irrelevant and at worst a distraction. Chances are, I haven't even thought about it in the midst of tweaking sentence structure and fine-tuning the details.