{"id":525,"date":"2017-12-08T02:34:07","date_gmt":"2017-12-08T02:34:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.writingroutines.com\/?p=525"},"modified":"2017-12-08T15:27:44","modified_gmt":"2017-12-08T15:27:44","slug":"best-music-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.writingroutines.com\/best-music-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"The Best Music To Listen To While You Write (According To 9 Bestselling Authors)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Writers will try <\/span>almost anything<\/span><\/a> to help them write. Gertrude Stein had assistants herd cows into her line of view for inspiration. Hunter Thompson alternated between cocaine and Chivas<\/a> from all day trying to find his zone. Victor Hugo instructed his valet to hide his clothes so he was forced to write in the nude<\/a>, removing his temptation to leave the house.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of the more widely practiced (and legal) writing aids, listening to music is one almost every writer has experimented with in their career. For some, music is the destroyer of any good writing session. Others see music as the fast lane to a creative promiseland. A way to shut out everything else around them and produce their best work. And in contrast to the methods mentioned in the introduction, studies <\/span>have<\/span><\/i> shown that listening to music can help <\/span>facilitate divergent thinking<\/span><\/a> stimulate <\/span>focus<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you\u2019re a writer in the pro-music camp, one question remains: What is the <\/span>best <\/span><\/i>music to listen to? Well, procrastination ends here. Below are the tunes that nine bestselling, award winning authors use to jumpstart their sessions. (Bonus: here are all the songs in a <\/span>Spotify playlist<\/span><\/a> if you\u2019re ready to give them all a try.)<\/span><\/p>\n

1) Philip Glass<\/b><\/h3>\n


\n<\/span>Viet Thanh Nguyen<\/span><\/a>, whose novel <\/span>The Sympathizer<\/span><\/i><\/a> was a <\/span>New York Times <\/span><\/i>bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, and the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, is a recent convert to music-while-writing. Early on, he was careful not to listen to much of anything when he wrote. Viet explained his change of heart:<\/span><\/p>\n

“I preferred silence before I wrote <\/span><\/i>The Sympathizer<\/span>, but on <\/span><\/i>The Sympathizer<\/span> I thought: Okay, let\u2019s try this with some music, but not anything too distracting. I\u2019m usually not listening to anything with lyrics for the most part. I actually listen repetitively to Philip Glass. With <\/span><\/i>The Sympathizer<\/span>, especially <\/span><\/i>The Hours<\/span>. I wanted to have some of the feel of his music in the rhythm of the prose.”<\/span><\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Two songs to get you started:<\/span><\/p>\n