Music and Writing

I guess I should use this distraction to distract me from cleaning my room. Really, it's just my kitchen I have to clean: my archnemesis. I despise it really. The stack of dishes that have conspired against. Half of them seem clean; the other half dirty. While I listen to my iTunes cleaning playlist, I see this story about a young boy battling caked grease and left over food with his superpowers: soap, hot water, and lemon juice.

This isn't the first time that this has happened. I create stories to the rhythm of the songs. I've noticed this coorelation between writing and music; well, I've noticed it in my writing. Growing up, I've been told that nothing else should be going on while writing in school. With many of the things that they taught me, I've grown to appreciate this foundation. I consider myself a musical writer, only because I use music to help my writing.

I always loved music. It always provided some kind of emotional escape or emotional evocation that is involved with writing. Especially for personal usage, writing can be a very therapeutic. If we are writing about our emotions and feelings, why not truly tap into those feelings with music of the same emotional appeal. I don't think any of this made sense until my senior year of high school. In an earlier post, I mentioned my AP literature teacher. She first introduced me to the concept of being a musical writer. When my mentor died, she wanted us to pour our emotions into whatever we writing. Because we were facing a great loss, the atmosphere (music she played) was extremely depressed. Now, I think I understand why decided to use that method. In our society today, music seems to be everywhere. You hear music while shopping, eating, even television shows have music to them. My question is why not writing?

I like to believe that being in band for six years and having a mother who was in band herself has helped me easily access the "pathos" taught as one of the appeals in argument, or in this case, writing. Yes, writing your own feelings is a great thing, but to write while living in the emotion has got to be something powerful. For me, I found that while I'm listening I'm allowed to explore this stream of consciousness. Whatever, I'm feeling falls onto the paper. There's no need to mess with raw creativity at this stage, at least not for me. When the revising stage occurs, there is so much to shape and mold into eloquent, powerful rhetoric. What more can I ask for?