I can’t speak for other writers, but speaking for this writer, I like to write while listening to music. There’s something about having music flowing around me that makes the words flow.
Some writers, I’ve heard, like to write to soundtracks or classical music.
I like to write to jazz.
I don’t have a large jazz music library. I haven’t needed it. That’s what the radio is for. 😉
In Raleigh, for instance, I listened to WSHA, the jazz radio station at Shaw University. An excellent radio station, by the way.
Baltimore, unfortunately, doesn’t have a very good jazz station.
At work, I’d put links for a couple of NPR stations on my desktop. Among those, Morgan State’s station, WEAA, which does have a jazz format.
But WEAA just doesn’t speak to me. Not the way WSHA did when I lived in Raleigh.
You would think, with the internet being the wondrous device that it is, that I’d have been able to tap the WSHA stream, right?
Well, for the longest time, I simply couldn’t make it work. I’m not sure where the problem lay. Maybe it was in my computer at the office. Maybe it was a malformed page on their end. Either way, I spent my days writing to the dulcet tones of NPR’s news programming. Oh, yippee.
On Monday, I decided to see if I could pull up the WSHA stream.
And I could!
I put a shortcut to the WSHA internet stream on my desktop.
Now I’m enjoying top-notch jazz at work, and it makes the words just flow. There’s something about hearing the blare of the trumpet, the steady backbeat of a bass and the tinkling of the drumskins and symbols, the tickling of the ivory. It just puts me in the mood, y’know?
Maybe it’s just my imagination, but I feel like the words this month are better.
Maybe that’s all I needed.
Jazz. 🙂