Tag: background

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Background Noise

Whenever I’m starting a longer writing session, I like to play some music in background. Over time, my playlist of choice has changed.

It was initially the soundtrack of the film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, composed by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Since that lasted only around 45 minutes, I bulked up the playlist to just over an over with more Nick Cave songs.

More recently, I’ve switched to a musician called Jason Lewis, although I can’t recall when I first discovered his work. Since 2006, he’s produced three-hour mixes with isochronic tones. These are regular repetitions of a single tone mixed into rapid beats, which are supposed to enhance concentration.

From what I can gather, there’s no scientific basis for this, but I find his mixes work for me. They’re completely instrumental, allowing me to focus on writing, and free to access on YouTube.

The only real difference between the soundtrack and the Jason Lewis music is the familiarity. With Cave and Ellis, I would hear exactly the same songs in the same order and know roughly where in the playlist I was. With Jason Lewis, by contrast, I tend to listen to either the most recent mix or choose one that matches the mood of my piece.

Of course, I’m completing this entry at my regular Tuesday writing group, which comprises whatever the bar decides to play. It can be a strange mixture of pop, metal, easy listening, dance or rap, with no apparant pattern. Tonight is a reasonable mix, featuring Elton John and Kiki Dee with Don’t Go Breaking My Heart right now.

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Expelling the Exposition

Last week, I was inspired to write a short story, but it needed a lot of background information to be included before the action happened. As I was planning it out, though, I couldn’t figure out how to explain it without boring the reader.

In the years I’ve been writing, one technique I’ve found to work is simply to write the story, exposition and all. Afterwards, it’s usually a case of taking a step back and trying to carve out a structure from what’s on the page.

In this case, I had a character that should have arrived at a place by 6pm and was uncontactable by phone until 8pm before finally showing up at 9:30pm. I initially had the action take place at 8pm, with the characters holding a conversation between that time and 9:30pm.

Looking back over what I’d written, I realised I could dispense with the 8pm call and set the action nearer 9:30pm. That had the effect of both reducing the explanation and intensifying the surprise as the arrival was now completely unexpected. I also placed much of the exposition into dialogue instead of descriptive paragraphs.

That meant I could start the action earlier and it took off with gusto. I wrote so much that I was able to split the narrative, with a cliffhanger between the two parts.