Thursday, March 14, 2013

Writing Tips - Ambient Sound



I'm still waiting to hear back on fulls and partials that I have out there in agent land, so I thought I would begin posting fun writing tips or aids as I ran across them.

A lot of writers write to music. Many authors post playlists of the songs they listened to while writing their novels. I live in the country and do a lot of driving around by myself. If I have the radio on, I'm listening to that. If I have music on, I'm singing along - I can't help it, I was a singer before I was anything else. Now, there's nothing wrong with any of that, but I've found that some of my most productive 'writing' time has been when I've been driving around, deep in my thoughts, plotting my book. But it's kind of lonely doing that to complete silence, particularly at night. Celtic and New Agey stuff helps - Loreena McKennit, Clannad, etc - but I'm often tempted to sing along with them too.

Home was harder - I couldn't begin writing until everyone else was asleep because the background household noise distracts me and my music distracted everyone else (I've really got to get some stained glass up in those empty transoms!). My writing days were beginning after midnight and going on till the wee hours of the morning. I'm a night owl, but I have children that I have to get up with in the morning.

And then I discovered Simply Rain. The name says it all - rain and random peals of thunder. It puts me in the sort of 'moody' mood that I need to write and masks the sounds outside my office but it doesn't distract. I love it.

Ambient Mixer is another ambient sound generator I stumbled on recently. The cool thing about this site is the sheer variety of sounds available. You can even create your own mixes or alter the mixes you find there.

There's a lot of Mommy/Writers out there - if anyone has stumbled across other online sites that help with concentration, feel free to post in the comments!


© 2013 Heather Senter


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