This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. I discovered my favorite writing music in the winter of 2023, at an audio art exhibition in Berlin. It was an otherworldly experience—instead of paintings or sculptures filling the cavernous white space of the museum, headphones lined the walls.
Listening to track after track of avant garde sounds, I eventually came upon the minimalist composers Arnold Dreyblatt and Charlemagne Palestine. Their compositions cycled through the same two or three notes repeatedly, creating what’s known as consonant harmony: the phantom tones between notes. I played the compositions for a friend, who said “This must be what going mad sounds like.” Playing it later as I typed, all I could think was: This is perfect.
What does it mean, for a song to be “good writing music”? Artists’ preferences for background music are often strange and always diverse. When writing, a little melodic madness seems required.
It brings to mind religious ceremonies designed to reach ascendant levels of meditation or spiritual ecstasy—the whirling dervishes in Sufism, monks circumambulating a Buddhist statue, Islamic pilgrims revolving around the Kaaba, or Catholics repeating the same prayer as they cycle through rosary beads. Throughout history, humans have used cyclical patterns to shed the petty parts of ourselves and to open the door to our deeper minds. For example, when writing Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin moved to a remote village in the Swiss Alps, bringing with him one Bessie Smith album that he played incessantly.
For others, it’s simply a matter of practicality. Metallic Realms author Lincoln Michel listens to Sleep’s stoner metal song “Dopesmoker,” partially because of its length: “It’s a handy unit of time at 64 minutes,” he recently told me. Her sentences had a beat all their own, and she often worried about disrupting the metronome: “I don’t want anybody else’s speech rhythms in my dream,” Didion said in a 1978 Paris Review interview.
Similarly, Jonathan Franzen writes in dark room with earplugs and noise cancelling headphones blasting pink noise (a deeper, more balanced version of white noise). Very few writers are as monastic as Franzen when it comes to aural distraction, but many prefer wordless instrumental tracks. Still, even that isn’t set in stone… there are some writers that don’t mind a singer.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
