Let’s see…what sort of music do you listen to? Do you listen to music when you write?
I listen to music when I write. In the time that I’m doing my email and taking phone calls, I listen to jazz, I might listen to rock, I might listen to reggae, it might be rap, it might be some third world music. There’s some good sort of jazz fusion stuff—I’m not sure what exactly you’d call it—coming out of various north African nations, and I have some Latin nations…a lot of different stuff. I just grab something at random, and tuck a couple of CDs in there, or a CD to cover that. Then when I began writing, it pulls down classical music of various kinds, very few vocals unless it’s in a foreign language. Carmina Burana works well, because it’s in Latin…and maybe other things, Japanese drums, Chinese flute…you know, that can get into that mix, it doesn’t interfere. I can’t write to the jazz or the rock. I can’t write to vocals that I understand. I get into a focus when I am writing so that I am absolutely, totally, 100% focused on that writing.
I have a window on the right side of my desk that looks out over what we call the side garden. If I turn my head slightly to the left, I’m looking at a door that’s made up of little glass panes looking out into what we call the long garden—that’s where the driveway runs through the back to the garage—and I can remember a day when I got up and walked outside into the long garden, and I looked around, and it amazed me, because not only was everything wet…there were branches that were drooping and dripping water, I mean they were so heavy with water that some branches were drooping. There were broken branches as much as two inches in diameter, I think there was one that was as much as three inches in diameter, lying in the driveway. We’d had a major rainstorm—a major windstorm—and I hadn’t known it. I was that tight into the work, that I didn’t hear the wind, I didn’t hear the rain, I didn’t see any of it. It was just the work, and I didn’t know it till I went outside.
In a sense, I wonder if that’s why readers again so easily get that suspension of everything as they lose themselves in the work as a reader.
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