Writing and music are two completely different mediums yet, personally, they are both something I couldn't imaging living without. With that said I have a two part question for y'all.

First: Does anyone here need music to write? Now I know that sounds like a weird question but it isn't. As a writer myself I have difficulty writing a story some days but one way that helps me with ideas and getting in the mood is music. I just pop on some headphones and search for music to listen to. Its has been very beneficial for me and I have even written a short story completely based on a song I heard. I'm just curious if there are other who think like this as well, or am I the only one.

Second: How do you deal with music and musically influenced characters? In the stories I write, many of them involve music or someone who likes listening to music (it my thing I know) Though I only have made maybe one or two stories I use music in them and they are important components to the story. It is really difficult to express music in writing but, counting on the story and character, it is the most appropriate thing to have. Especially since the MLP universe has people like Octavia, Vinyl, Pinkie, and other such musical characters as well as a musical world, its a question worth asking.

Thank you for reading and have a nice day!

I always listen to music while I write. I personally dont like the complete silence when I just sit here,thinking about what to write next. I just need something to listen to (idk)

Firstly: Yes. Though really it's more like I need music to function somedays.
Heck, if my headphones break in the middle of the day, I immediately start hitting up nearby stores to buy new headphones. It's just a little extra bit of mental stimulation, but it really seems to help. I also tend to pick music based on what I'm doing. When I work out, I pick fast-paced, angry music. If I'm studying, I choose stuff with no lyrics so I can't get distracted that way. It's the same for writing, and depending on what I write the music changes too, though like with studying I find I do better with music without lyrics.

Second: I've been doing my best to avoid songs or the like in my writing. I actually don't know anything about music, and don't want to try and write lyrics or the like because I think it would show the weakness. The only time I mentioned music was a brief refrain fron that lullaby Sweetie Belle beasted.

Thanks for asking a cool question, and have a nice day!

5198614 1. I listen to music most of my waking day and always when I write. It makes the word crafting torture more bearable.

2. In my novel, I have a character go into the singing mode (just like they sometimes do on the show). I intend to make a music videos for the songs in the story with music and singing and everything. I just need to brush up on my music crafting a bit more.

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I definitely listen to music while I write. I have staggeringly massive collection of soundtracks and instrumental pieces (80+ GBs of it, legal), and I listen to about 8-10 hours of it a day as I work (which is writing).

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I wouldn't say I need it, but I often listen to music when I'm writing and most of my stories have scenes that were inspired by one song or another. In fact, one of my stories was entirely inspired by a song and there a are a few scenes throughout it that were also inspired by music. I've also got a couple of ideas I may or may not get around to writing that were also inspired by music.

So far I don't have any characters that are heavily influenced by music unless you count my portrayals of Lyra, Octavia and Vinyl Scratch in my comedy Not Dead Yet. But I do have a character in an upcoming story that is. His name is Maestro and he's a bit of a musical prodigy. In the story he's only about eleven years old, but he's already composing his own symphonies which he then conducts himself. In addition he plays a few instruments, mostly brass, his favorite of which is the trombone (which he caries with him almost all the time). He's also a bat-pony.

The story is set in my Midnight Star universe and is set about 18 years after Twilight's coronation (Which is where the Midnight Star universe stops following canon.) Sweetie Belle is a huge pop star, and though Maestro doesn't know her, since he grew up in Dodge, he's a hug fan. It's not in the story where he's a major character, but he will eventually meet Sweetie Belle in my stories.

As far as how I write about his music, I usually try to describe it from the perspective of someone who doesn't know a lot about music, describing the kind of emotions the music stirs in the audience. He is also very passionate about music and even at eleven he calls music the language of the soul.

5198614 First: I can't write without music. The right music can help build the scene of the tone and emotion that I'm going for and can even help build ideas for scenes or a full story. It gets my mind working. Music more or less drives my stories and my writing. I'm the kind of guy who all but lives with music playing and earbuds stuck in my ears.

Second: I have a lot of things in stories, from characters to scenes, influenced by music (in terms of writing them). Though I've not really dealt with having music as a part of the story. I have written a short one shot that was completely inspired by a song and the song was more or less the theme of the story. The way I did it was talk about sounds and notes being heard but in a way that only the main character could hear.

5198614 I find that it depends on my mood. With the fic I'm working on right now, I actually have a few songs I listen to to get myself in the mood for the situation. Sometimes, though, the wrong music will just be a distraction.

Weirdly enough, music helps me do math homework o.o.

5198614 I listen to music all the time when I write, very rarely do I ever write something without having something playing in the background. With that said, some scenes that I write are inspired from listening to music before I get to writing the actual scene.

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As to your first question: I often use music as a way to find inspiration or keep inspiration going. I even have these special blogs that I do to share some of my favorite "writing music" with my followers.

As to the second question, I've always enjoyed having an element of music in my writing. For one fic, Chasing the Briny Neighsayer, I wrote an original sea shanty. In my mature FlutterDash fic, What They Expect to Give, music is a central part to the plot and developing romance. I've written a few original songs for it, though I'm not a musician myself. My approach was to learn about song formats, and to stick to easy to identify rhythms. The latter is easiest to convey with rhymes, but I've considered non-rhyming schemes.

I'm an amateur poet, so I enjoy writing this kind of stuff. I've contemplated commissioning a musician for a song, though.

I write stories and then create songs to accompany them. It just seems to make my little worlds come more alive.

5198614 I have a very different relationship to music than most people, due to actually making music, so listening to music makes it harder to write sometimes. Let me explain. When you make music you start to analyze all the music you listen to, which is very counter-productive while writing. Listening to music can sometimes make me feel a flash of extreme sadness due to envy or jealously, kind of like how it is when reading a story so much better than yours, so that further complicates matters. I sometimes try listening to my own music to see if that helps; nope. However, I can listen to music if the song is so good that I can't find anything to be jealous about due to being so far above me it's ridiculous.

Now, about the character thing. Ironically, I think I would have trouble writing a 'normal' musically inclined character. Why? Because I rarely listen to music and have no formal education in music, meaning my relationship is purely feeling based. I wouldn't know how to write Octavia, or even Vinyl. Yet I think I would be able to describe music itself in a story if I wanted to, and how a character feels about it. But not anything to to with lyrics or formal musical stuff.

5198614 I can't write without music, usually modren metal. The silence that comes when I am writing in my room without music makes me depressed.

I have never have written an actual song in my stories, outside of ones from the show. But I have written a small one shot inspired by a song that I listen to. I wrote for more just fun and hasn't been released.

5198654 agreed. I'm right there with you. Music for everything.

It just happens that for doing things requiring thought, Metal, Dubstep, and Carillon are great, and ominous chanting for martial arts practice.

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First: Does anyone here need music to write?

It looks like I'm the odd duck here as I prefer to write without music or background sounds of any kind. I like my silence and to apply my full concentration to the words.

That said, I do listen to music when I am thinking about or planning writing. In trying to nail down what I want to happen in a specific scene, I generally use something catchy and repetitive on repeat. The recurring parts of the song help me focus on viewing and refining what I want to have happen. For more general thinking or planning, I prefer classical/electronic instrumental pieces or covers which have those elements and a wider variety. Benedictine Chants are also good for me for some reason.

Second: How do you deal with music and musically influenced characters?

For the most part, I shy away from describing the actual music and instead focus on metaphoric descriptions of how it sounds and the reactions of those listening to it. Putting actual songs in text can work (I vaguely recall James and the Giant Peach doing that pretty well), but it's not something I can do very well if at all.

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Does anyone here need music to write?

I don't need it to write... it inspires me to write. The cold, haunted reverberance of Between Interval's atmospheric instrumental song, "Leviathan" brought to mind the Frozen North and the 1,000 year prison sentence King Sombra was condemned to when banished by Celestia and Luna. I was looking for a way to recreate the same amazing aura of stillness with time's stopping in another Sombra banishment story, but told in my own way and knew I had found it through the eerie silliness in this incredible song. The result was me writing the ending first of my story "Frozen Shadows", then striving to set up a taste of that time-stopping stillness earlier on in the story so readers would know what was coming. Nearly every word I've written had been with this piece playing in the background as a constant reminder of what this curse meant for not just Sombra, but thousands of ponies trapped in the Crystal Empire with him.

Other songs by Between Interval and other groups/singers have had the amazing timing of coming along just exactly when I was ready to take another part of Sombra's story - Moya Brennan's songs - including one with the phrase, "crystal horizon" which gave me his backstory with Princess Luna.

Because of this I have come to treasure atmospheric music and some pop songs as not just necessary, but also as a treasured gift without which my writing would be so much poorer!

5198614 1. I don't necessarily need music to write, but I do find it helps, especially when the songs and pieces themselves fit with what I am currently writing. I've developed entire stories, themes, plots, and otherwise based on songs I've heard, which is aided by the fact that I mostly listen to orchestral pieces, or many instrumental songs from soundtracks. In fact, one of my stories, which is currently on a short hold due to the fact that my focus is currently laid elsewhere, has a bountiful amount of scenes and themes based on songs I listen to. You could even say that the entire plot, as well as the world built around it, have stemmed from music.

2. Like with most things, music, to truly be influential upon a character and a story, needs to be important, not just to the character him or herself, but to the plot or theme as well. Maybe not to the point where it's a dominating factor, but it still needs to hold some significance, and not simply exist as some minor detail or piece of characterization. That's the rule I've always stuck by when it comes to characters influenced by music or some other factor, object, hobby, or otherwise.

5198669 80+ GBs? Jesus f'ing Christ, that's... mind numbingly large. And I thought I had a lot. I've got a little over 250 songs in my library, and that only amounts to around 2 GBs.

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Years in the making, my friend. Years in the making. And still growing. A good investment, considering the hours I spend each week writing.

Last I made an estimate of my entire collection's length, it took somewhere around a month and a half of straight listening.

By which I mean that's how long you'd have to listen, day and night, to listen to all of it.

5198614 1,000+ songs on my phone and a worn out pair of headphones.

5198848 I both completely understand, and heavily question your feelings towards this but hey, it's you taste not mine.

I, personally, draw inspiration for a scene, or even chapter's atmosphere. And, while I make a point to not mention songs by mame, I've left a link or two in bedded if someone wants to hear something.

If it's something that characters react to, I have tried doing things like "X smiled as they watched the ponies' look of confusion, at the songs introduction, turn to mute horror as the singer belted out the first verse." Or "The crowd's enthusiasm rapidly increased with the beat of the drums but once they heard the guitar star screaming out a solo, they went ballistic." That sort of thing.
(Imagine this being any of the number of "edgy" songs people like to write reactions about.)

5198614 I always listen to music when I am writing from movie soundtracks to songs from the 1950s to the 1980s.

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80+ GBs of it, legal)

Methinks he doth protest too much.