Desperate Times, Desperate Measures

Jumping off Cake Man’s Don’t Never Change, I really don’t know if I have a regular enough process to the extent that I’d call it my “writing process”. I would say that I have writing habits that fluctuate greatly. I’m a young writer, and perhaps when I’m older things will be more concrete, but right now they’re all over the place. If anything they center around music lately.

I’ve usually been off and on with writing with music. I find that sometimes it helps a great deal to listen to an instrumental tune that captures the mood of a script or scene. For the most part I found that songs with lyrics were very distracting, but lately I do a lot of writing to songs with lyrics. Most recently I’ve been obsessively listening to Phobia by Breaking Benjamin, an alternative metal group. Zombie, the music guru in the group, is probably cringing at my music selection right now, cringing or cutting himself. Odd it may be (especially if you knew me) but I like it damn it, and I write tons of pages through 46 minute loops of that album. Thing is, I don’t know if those pages are any good yet seeing that nobody has read them. This habit of listening to songs with lyrics has a present, certainly a past, and possibly a future with me. Speaking about that past.

My current writing habit was born out of desperate times, back when I was crashing at my brother’s place for nine months. I was doing some writing when my work was interrupted by my brother’s roommate having what must have been acrobatic sex with his girlfriend. I can say for certain that writing to people having sex is a very bad writing habit. I didn’t have my own music to escape to, so I just put on some headphones and listened to some of my brother’s stuff. The songs had lyrics and the evening turned out to be one of my most productive in terms of putting out pages. And so the habit was born. I’m going to try and get some eyes on my new pages soon. My last script was written mostly to a combination of Red Hot Chilipeppers and Sia, and those pages were received well somehow. If these new ones are ok then maybe I’m a step closer to my writing process.