Music and writing

By some of my earlier writings, you can probably tell that I'm not only a writer, but a musician as well. I love to play my guitar and sing, but I take them much less seriously than I take my writing. I still want to improve in music, but I have no intentions of pursuing it as a profession. But that doesn't mean that I haven't thought about how I can incorporate my music into my writing.

Obviously one of the ways in which I do this is by using music as a plot point in stories. But the more interesting way I thought about doing this when I was younger was by giving my books soundtracks. I remember being young and listening to audio books, specifically those for Harry Potter, and while I stopped doing this as much as I grew up, the concept never left my mind. Eventually, it occurred to me that, theoretically, I could take this one step further. If movies and games could have soundtracks, why not books?

The idea was that I would write music intended to be listened to during particular scenes or chapters in my story. This would probably mean that songs would have to be particularly long, or perhaps be directly mentioned in the story, and of course would be an unnecessary but hopefully cool addition you could get to the book. The problem is that I'm not particularly good at actually writing music. It just so happens to be that writing music and writing stories are two vastly different processes.

Thinking back on that now, I have another problem that would also get in the way of making a soundtrack for my books, that problem being entirely unique to me. I actually do often listen to music while I'm writing, but the music I listen to has a bizarre tendency to be polar opposite to what I am writing. I've written some of my best fight and death scenes, for instance, while listening to very upbeat love music. I can't explain why it happens, but it does. Somehow, I feel like if I tried to swap the two, to write music based on the story set before me, they wouldn't quite line up.

But I still love that idea. I would gladly buy a soundtrack for a book, to listen to specific songs while I read about an author's world. To be taken in more than one sense into that marvelous story, to feel even more as though I am experiencing it, rather than just seeing it from the outside. And then, could you imagine if that soundtrack was then taken in to consideration when a movie is being made from the book? That would be amazing. I would be taken that much more into the movie, because there would be that much more familiar from the book going in.

I feel like the connection between music and writing is one that hasn't been explored enough. There is so much more that we could be doing to connect these two things, but I have yet to see anyone try. And maybe I'm not the guy to be doing, but I would love to see someone else take on my idea one day and make it a reality.