My Writing Playlist

It's the score to the words I write. The symphony behind the pages.


No, you probably wouldn't see Fernando Ortega trapsing around the Blue Ridge Mountains dressed up in hillbilly garb...but that doesn't mean his music doesn't play a roll in the scenes I write, helping me set the mood--sometimes sad, other times dramatic. Whatever the emotion I'm trying to put into my charachters, music plays a huge roll.

I call it my Writing Playlist.

Everything from the rock of Gavin DeGraw and the Fray to the old-time bluegrass of Alison Krauss and Nickle Creek to worship with Casting Crowns and the David Crowder Band.

Whenever I have writer's block (which happens rather often as the mother of two little ones) I throw on my ipod, head out for a walk and let the music transport me to another time and place...away from peanut butter and kiddie pools...to the drama of the worlds I'm trying to create--whether it's an upbeat musical scene or a tense, heart-wrenching goodbye. The music takes me on a mini writer's vacation. One where the scenes play out in my mind like the climax of a movie and suddenly the writer's block vanishes.

The playlist is always evolving. Often I dedicate a particular song to a single charachter. It becomes their theme. When I need to draw that charachter out of my mind and onto the computer, I put on their theme song and I'm instantly swept up in their world, their emotions, their purpose.

Then there are the songs and sounds that are not on my Writer's Playlist but exist within the world around me: a symphony of summer crickets coming out just after sunset, the husky voice of leather-skinned grandfather, the sound of bacon frying in a cast-iron pan. These sounds do not have on and off buttons and cannot be downloaded for a fee at my heart's desire--but exist only in the moment, and it is by the grace of God that He gives us these moments, these glimpses into another world, time and place. A world where our imaginations can run wild.