Listening to Music Counts as Writing

How My Novel Playlists Make Me More Productive

While some writers make mood boards to capture the tone and aesthetics of their novels, I make playlists. For a good portion of my writing life, I thought these activities were just convoluted forms of procrastination. Nothing counted as writing except for writing. This narrow viewpoint was also the reason why I resisted outlining. If I wasn’t actively drafting the story, I thought any other activity was a waste of my time. I abandoned this misconception in the early days of the pandemic and picked up a hobby of making “mood” playlists for my writing projects. To my surprise, this “hobby” actually made my writing more productive.

Now that I’m working full-time, it’s difficult for me to keep up with my writing goals. Finding time to write isn’t my problem since I live alone and have no responsibilities to anyone other than myself. But I do struggle with finding the energy to write. Lately, I’ve noticed that the most difficult part of writing while working full-time is context switching. During the day, I sit at my cubicle and solve certain kinds of problems all to come home and solve a different set of problems in my writing. Transitioning from my work brain to my writing brain requires a lot of energy. However, I’ve discovered that my novel playlists reduce this energy tax and help me have more productive writing sessions on weeknights.

For each writing project, I create a playlist that captures the tone of my story. These playlists help me stay connected to my work when I’m not actively writing, and that connection makes it much easier for me to transition into my writing mindset.

I spent the last several years working on two novels. Here’s how I created their playlists and used each one to increase my productivity.

Lit by Burning

The Pitch

Jo Tope’s birth mother left her in a high chair in the neighbor’s house and never came back. This is how the Topes, an African-American family of four, adopted a white baby.

Lit by Burning is a literary, coming-of-age novel that follows Jo Tope, a habitually drunk college student who desperately wants to become white. Growing up with her identity split between the Black family that raised her and the white schools she attended, Jo always thought that college would be her chance to escape her past and fully embrace whiteness. Now, a junior at Johns Hopkins University, she pursues a Rhodes Scholarship, believing that a graduate degree from Oxford is her path to becoming a regular white person. But when her alcoholic tendencies threaten her personal relationships and her chances at the Rhodes, Jo must learn that whiteness will not save her before she loses her academic future and the people who matter most.

The Playlist

You can listen to Lit’s playlist on Spotify. The mood is great for when you’re getting ready for a night out, but you know you’re going to cry in the club. I love this playlist because its tone emulates the exact reading experience I wanted the novel to offer.

How I Used It

Lit by Burning is set in 2015 and loosely based on my own experience as a Black student at Hopkins. Some of the songs on the playlist remind me of being twenty-one and cruising to The Broadway Diner in the back of my friend's dilapidated minivan. Others capture the excitement of Jo’s dangerously optimistic ambition and the anxiety she attempts to self-medicate with alcohol. 

I shelved Lit when it died on sub last year, but I spent the first few months of 2022 working on a revise and resubmit request from a publisher. At the time, I was teaching at a hagwon, an afterschool English education program in Korea. It was winter break for the students, and that meant I was working overtime from 9 AM to 10 PM, teaching winter camp classes in the morning and my usual classes at night. Even though I could only write on the weekends, I listened to the playlist as I made photocopies of spelling tests, wiped down the Samsung tablets between classes, and ate protein bars on my breaks. Since I deeply associated the music with the themes, characters, and situations of my novel, my brain was always a little bit in writing mode throughout the day. This meant that when I got home on Friday night and sat down to write, I didn’t have to spend as much energy context switching because I was already partially in my writing headspace.

Although I’ve set this book aside for now, I still love this playlist, and I know it will help me come back to Jo’s story when I’m ready to revise it later in my writing life.

You Will Survive This

The Pitch

You Will Survive This is a literary novel that blends romance and speculative fiction to tell the story of a Black woman who falls in love with a thousand-year-old man. Izzy Hayes is a folklore anthropologist conducting research in Seoul. When she meets Kim Taejong—a strange man cursed with immortality—she agrees to help him discover what folklore creature he is so that he can use its weakness to finally find peace. Alternating between the perspectives of Izzy, Taejong, and Blanche—a survivor of Taejong’s former cult—the story complicates as Taejong wants to find peace in a permanent death immediately, Izzy wants him to stay alive for the remainder of her lifetime, and Blanche wants to kill Taejong to take his immortality for herself.

The Playlist

You can listen to YWST’s playlist on Spotify here. If an existential crisis could be in love, this is what it would sound like.

How I Use It

As you’re probably aware, I am deep in revision land for this book. Now, for my office job, I have a thirty minute walking commute. In the morning, as I listen to the playlist, I think about the question I asked myself in my last writing wind down exercise, and I brainstorm ways to answer that question in my next writing session. Sometimes I jot down ideas in DayOne as I walk, but most of the time I’m just problem solving the craft issue in my head by asking myself, “What if . . .” over and over again.

On my way home, I put in my earbuds again and press play, but this time I’m thinking in concrete images. What does the answer to this question look like in-scene? What does Izzy see, hear, and smell in this scene? How does she feel about everything she’s witnessing? Here, I’m more likely to take notes about what I see in my mind’s eye as I move through the crowd on the street. This image is my gateway into my writing session. By the time I get home and open my manuscript, I’m ready to make that image a reality on the page.

If you’re interested in making a playlist for your own writing project, here are the steps that I use:

1. Write a 1-paragraph summary of your story.

2. Add songs to the playlist using the following guiding questions:

   1. What songs remind you of the protagonist?

   2. What songs remind you of the antagonist?

   3. What songs remind you of another central character (love interest, best friend, family member, etc.)?

   4. What songs remind you of the novel’s time period?

   5. What songs capture the tone of the novel?

   6. What songs best represent the theme of the novel?

   7. What songs encapsulate the central conflict of the novel?

3. Listen to the playlist whenever you’re not writing. Here are some suggestions for when to listen to your playlist:

   1. Commuting to work

   2. Doing dishes or laundry

   3. Exercising

   4. Working at your day job

Try out the playlist and let me know if it helps you transition from your everyday life to your writing life.

How else do you engage with your writing when you’re not actively writing? Do you make mood boards? Are you more of a Pinterest person? Have you ever made a playlist for your book? Is there another cool activity I don’t know about? Tell me all the ways you energize your creativity in the comments.

As I mentioned in last week’s AMA, my book is very close to being ready for sub. My deadline is February 27th, so my replies to comments and emails might be slow this month. Next week’s free post will be a short feature of books that changed my life. On Sunday, February 19th, we’ll be diving into our next craft lesson on best practices for writing Act I of your story.

See you next week,

Kat