Read her work in the anthology Saltwater Sorrows– edited by Rhonda Parrish (Tyche Books)
You won’t make it far in writing circles without hearing the question come up: Do you write with music? Sound? Silence? The answers are as varied as the writers giving them. I can only speak with authority about the process that’s worked for me over the last decade of writing – your mileage may vary.
Building a playlist for my project is the first step of my writing process. Once I have a story idea I want to pursue, be it a novel or a short story, I sit at my computer, open Spotify, and start searching for songs.
I start broad, either with a handful of songs I already know fit the tone/vibe of the story, or by using search terms related to the project. For “Human, Still,” in the forthcoming Tyche Books anthology Saltwater Sorrows, I might search “drowning,” “ocean,” or even “bottom of the sea”. Just to see what I’ll get.
(Some favorites I ended up with for that story were “From a Shell” by Lisa Germano and “Can You Feel the Sun – Stripped” by MISSIO. Listen to the playlist here.)
Once I’ve collected a handful of songs, Spotify will suggest others based on the ones I’ve already added to my new playlist. This is where I can really explore and find artists and tracks I don’t already know. The idea is to find a mix of songs that fit the story idea, either tonally, thematically, or lyrically.
I know a lot of authors who only listen to instrumental music, or prefer ambient noise, or simply require silence. But my playlists don’t play by many rules – if a track fits the story, it’s fair game for a playlist. For my story “The Lament of Kivu Lacus” I listened to a loop of folk music, string quartets, and humpback whale songs. Another of my stories, “Bell Biv Derailed,” had a playlist made exclusively of 90s R&B.
Building the perfect story playlist serves a couple different purposes for me. First, it’s pre-writing. Collecting songs that evoke the themes and tone of the story I want to write helps the story congeal, molding it into something solid enough that I can actually find words to put down on paper.
Second, it’s a little bit of Classical Conditioning. Or a brain hack, if you prefer not to be likened to a drooling dog. Each time I sit down to write (or edit, or world-build, or, or, or) I listen to that project’s playlist. And the more I do that, the easier it is for my neuro-atypical brain to enter a flow state.
Eventually the playlist becomes a key to the front door of my story, welcoming me home to write every time I hear those songs.
So, why not build some playlists of your own, and start opening doors?
B. Zelkovich writes Speculative Fiction, anything from dragon hunting and space whales to demon-dealing and ghost tales. She likes to explore human emotions in very inhuman situations. When she isn’t escaping through her imagination, she escapes into the wonders of the Pacific Northwest with her spouse and their four-legged son, Simon.
Her fiction is in the forthcoming anthology Saltwater Sorrows (Tyche Books, Summer 2023) as well as Life Beyond Us, LOLcraft: A Compendium of Eldritch Humor, and Tree and Stone Magazine. Connect with her on twitter @BZelwen and online at bzelkovich.com
