Words and Music by Me, for Me
Curating a Creative Life — Monday Music
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Other than Thanksgiving, the arrival of November means one thing for me — 50 thousand words. November 1 is the first day of National Novel Writing Month, NaNo for short, where my goal is to write approximately 1667 words a day and complete a novel by the end of the month. It’s a pretty wild goal, but it’s one I’m going to try (again).
There’s just a couple of things standing in my way: (1) I’m not quite sure what story I’m going to be telling; and (2) life. My days tend to be pretty full with homeschooling one of my girls and keeping up with appointments for both girls and keeping up with household tasks. Even so, each year when November rolls around, my idealistic optimism kicks in and I declare this is the year I will once again win NaNo.
Winning means you actually write 50k words over the course of the month. I’ve done this one time. And to this day those words sit in my laptop files waiting on me to come back to them. They are what one might describe as a decent skeleton of a story, but they are not yet a complete story idea.
But this year, I will once again sit down at my laptop, turn on the carefully curated playlist for the still unknown story, and set my fingers and imagination loose to uncover a story waiting to be told.
Like I’ve said in previous weeks, music is an amazing inspiration when it comes to creativity, whether it’s writing, like I’m going to be doing, or pursuing a creative life, which I encourage all of you to do. Music can speak to the heart and the soul and it can unleash whispers of creativity and release nuances of ideas. Our role is merely to capture those ideas, those words, those projects and agree to give them our attention.
As my story comes more clearly into focus, I will spend time putting together a playlist that helps me work, that helps me hear and see the story in my writer’s mind as it plays out like a movie on the screen of my imagination. Carefully selected songs will become the soundtrack for my characters and for me.
What projects do you have on your horizon that might benefit from some carefully curated songs? Why not spend some time putting together the soundtracks that encourage and inspire you to do something new and creative today.
