It’s not exactly a secret that writers listen to music while working, and I’m even guilty of listening to specific kinds of music when writing certain kinds of projects (no copy/code/website buildout would ever be completed without The Who).
Screenwriter John August takes that one step further, assembling a specific soundtrack to match a specific screenplay project.
For Go, I had a mix tape with Christmas songs and rave beats. 1 For Big Fish, I burned a CD. In the age of iTunes, it’s vastly easier. Think of movies that resemble your movie, then click through their soundtracks, previewing tracks before adding them to a custom playlist.
Most of these songs would never be in your final movie. Rather, you are assembling music that reminds you of the feeling you’re trying to create. More crucially, you want music that reminds you why you’re writing this script.
A good playlist helps you get started. A great playlist helps you finish.
He also mentions he’s pretty damned sick of the soundtrack by the end of a screenplay, but by the same token, I’m usually pretty damned sick of any sizable project too.
Interestingly, he cops to using a soundtrack to focus himself while writing multiple projects (“It’s Tuesday and I’m listening to the Clash, so this must be Zombie Snow Bunnies 2“).
And writing multiple projects is the normal working state of most commercial writers.
In fact, marketing writers might be juggling upwards of a dozen projects at any one moment (no nasty emails about my slacker nature, please).
While assembling a specific soundtrack for a specific copywriting project is probably too much work for too little return, assembling a specific soundtrack for a specific kind of work might be useful.
Especially if one project was different from all the others (write copy all day, but work on that fiction project at night – to a whole different playlist).
My future includes an interesting essay project, and what the hell – probably a soundtrack to go with it.
Keep writing, Tom Chandler.
I use the same technique for my own projects (not so much for client work) and find it to be an effective way to quickly recapture the “mindset” or mood of a project, once the repetition ingrains the connection in your mind. You can even use a particular song as a crude “bookmark” to pick up where you left off the day before.
And it’s true, I get pretty burned out on the soundtrack by the time the project’s over, but like you said it makes sense. Eventually the songs lose their association, or they end up serving as a pleasant-memory trigger (they say we forget pain faster than we forget pleasure, after all).
I contend that any book written to a selection of John Barry film scores will automatically be a cut above. Now if I could just get a grant to study that…
Paul Lagasse(Quote) (Reply)
Interesting. I’ve used rock in the past to capture the manic energy you need to really plow through tedious stuff like web development, though I never thought about it in the context of linked memories.
This explains how parents who have raised two year-olds have another child…
TC(Quote) (Reply)