Music is essential to my writing process, sending me to another world, away from this one, and casting me into the moment with the characters. If I listen to, for example, ‘The Great White Open’ by Christian Löffler and Federico Albanese, or Dirty Three’s ‘Sue’s Last Ride’, I can start the process, like swimming towards the bottom of a pool and reaching a different place.

I write novels, short stories, and flash fiction. Lately, my efforts have focused on novel writing, and here there is room to breathe, to expand, to immerse completely within a character’s inner life and play out their dynamic with others. To make them be in the world. To do this—for me to work with their motivations and backgrounds—I cannot be here, but with them, and music helps with this trick.

 
In my day job, I don’t listen to music because I find it distracting. And this is precisely because music is transporting: it sweeps through me and takes me away. For this reason, so much of my writing includes references to music: atmosphere, a mood, a moment, are all created with reference to one song.
 
If I name a song, even one you may not know, say Elvis Presley’s ‘Kentucky Rain’, you are in a different place to where you were before I said it. If you don’t know the song, there is poetry in those four words: Elvis. Presley. Kentucky. Rain. And you would know Presley’s sound. But if you do know the song (lucky you), you are there with the melody and lyrics, and it isn’t that you are cutting to the song, but that another ingredient has been added to the story. This ability to give texture to a story, to make it granular, is one of the things I love about including music in my writing. It moves the reader.
 
Little wonder the best movies and streaming services have the best soundtracks and scores. A recent example, the Netflix series Beckham has an extraordinary score. It sends the viewer soaring. I am not a sports fan, but this series is a brilliant example of how you don’t have to be, because it was produced to make you feel the thrill of the game. And, of course, they use the music of MONO, masters in creating depth and elation, their music builds and builds.
 
And a tip: scores and music from soundtracks make ideal pickings for writing playlists. See  ‘Mandy Love Theme’ by Jόhann Jόhannsson from the 2018 horror film Mandy, or anything at all by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, such as the score for The Proposition.
 
Music is essential, too, when writing shorter fiction because crafting those pieces requires pure discipline, concision, and accuracy to within a knife’s edge, to keep the reader suspended within that story. And in flash, which at times is more akin to poetry, emotion and character must be delivered within such a tight word count, it needs to punch. Like a song, a short story or flash fiction only has a matter of bars to affect the reader.
 
Writing those short pieces is like diving into water, getting it written down, however rough in the first instance, before I reach the surface. A complete dive needs music. There are necessarily square brackets, blanks to return to, and things will change radically, but the fundamental story has been captured.
 
When I wrote my first novel, Ordinary Human Love, I used music all the time, and the type of music evolved as I went. When I was in the early thick-of scenes, I listened to lots of The Killers and Pearl Jam, I needed noise and energy. Sometimes I was writing the words so fast, the dialogue and the scene already captured in my head, and I just had to get it onto the page. In those times, I don’t know how much of the music I heard and how much it was setting the pace and closing me off from the rest of the world. Later, my music choices changed, more contemplative; I listened to Phoria, Max Richter, and Marianne Faithfull. 
 
Like many writers, I have a writing playlist on Spotify. I don’t play it exclusively when I’m writing, but it is an excellent starting point. And if a song bounces me back into reality, I can jump to another song.
 
I don’t have rules for the type of music I play. The music is probably dictated by the story being told and the process I am in. And if I am not immersed, if I am still fighting it, songs with lyrics can crowd out other thoughts, those mundanities we all must deal with: money, bills, repairs, blessed logistics, boring to-do lists. This is when songs with lyrics and a blizzard of sound are essential. See, The Vaccines’ ‘If You Wanna’, Blur’s ‘Sing’, Radiohead’s ‘Paranoid Android’. They make me stay in my seat and do the most important thing I could be doing: getting my words down. 
 
If it is the weekend or holidays, I will usually have my daughter in the same room as me, at a different desk, both of us writing. I still control the music, for now at least. We haven’t had to move to separate headphones, not yet. And I think it is the same for her, this hold music has over us, because while music is playing the everyday is irrelevant and each of us is in another world, creating with what? Fingers on keyboards and only our imaginations, life experiences, the empathy within our souls, conjuring stuff from nothing. And if it isn’t magic, then it must at least be a dream. For how else can it happen?