Using Music To Connect With Your Characters

As a fantasy writer, listening to the appropriate music while writing can really get you in ~the mood~ and set the tone for a scene, a situation, or the entire story.

Of course, when it comes to fleshing out your characters and really knowing who they are beyond just dialog on a page or a doodle on the canvas, one of the best tools (and possibly most underused even) is choosing the right songs for them.

I discovered this out of personal struggle. Since 2011/2012, I have been (very off-and-on) writing a story titled Beyond the Wall. To put it short, it's a POC Fantasy story, wedged somewhere between High and Low Fantasy (Middle Fantasy?) with elements of action, adventure, comedy, magic, and romance. It's set in my fictional world of Soren, an Earth-esque planet inhabited by elves (along with mythological animals and beasts). Based on my experience with writing this story and having to do all of the character development, music is the greatest asset a character creator (whether a writer or illustrator) can use when fleshing out a character and giving them a background and a life.

So, you know that magical feeling you get in the pit of your soul when an artist creates a song that perfectly captures how you feel about another person, situation, yourself, or your life, and they express it in their lyrics better than you could possibly could?

Take that principle and apply it to your characters. Finding songs that sound like your character could have created them is the musical key to connecting to them as their creator.

Once you get that song, or a playlist of 4 or 5 songs (or 20, or 30) that speak to the heart of your character and their personality, then you've got a strong and constant tool to use when trying to get in the head space and finding the muse for that character.

Where do you find music?

Sure, you can file through all the songs stashed in your music library and try to match them up with your characters. There's nothing wrong with that and it's fun and easier than music hunting because you're already familiar with the tunes at hand. The more broad your music taste, the easier this can be.

But, it can make things harder when you have a dark, broodish, and cynical character but most of the songs you know and enjoy are upbeat pop hits or electronic dance songs.
I had this issue a lot when I was younger and it made picking theme songs for my characters harder than ever. I finally found a way to combat this when I began to discover all of the amazing music tucked away in the hidden corners of the Youtube corn maze.

Youtube channels such as:

• Funky Panda
• ENM
• Elegant Sister (ES)
• MrSuicideSheep OR SuicideSheep (same guy, different channel)
• Indie Current
• Alrota Music 
• and xKito Music

all post songs by independent, up and coming, and hidden gem artists literally every single day (or close to it for some). Most, if not each, of these channels has playlists of dozens or sometimes hundreds of songs sorted by genre and make finding appropriate character songs so much easier than asking around for song suggestions from friends, on forums, hunting for songs with a certain sound or lyrics on google, or posting to Yahoo Answers.  I also have a habit of looking up songs I've heard and liked on tv commercials because they are often good and can come in handy for character stuff.

Think about your character's personality.

Imagine if Lurch's theme song was
 JT's Can't Stop the Feeling. Ill-fitting, yet oddly funny.

When choosing the right songs for your baby, you want to keep in mind who they are. What is their personality like? Are they brash? Tactful? Shy? Charming and charismatic? Sarcastic and cynical? Perhaps an odd mix. Find whatever adjectives describe them. If your character is a shy brooding type,  for example, then it might fare well for you to search for songs with lyrics that portray this sort of mentality and lifestyle. Of course, if you want to make a statement about your character keeping their true personality hidden, or them pretending to be someone they really aren't, then choosing a song that represents the real them and not their chosen persona would be best.

Lyrics might be dandy, but instrumentals can be handy.

Naturally, lyrics to a song are the most fun and easiest thing to match up to a character and storyline. However, you cannot ignore instrumental music either. The great thing about choosing instrumentals for your characters, is that they can help you to really get a feel for your character's presence and how they carry themselves, without having to worry about what the lyrics are saying.

Personally, when I choose instrumental songs for my characters, I don't ask myself what type of music would [character] listen to? so much as I ask if [character] was a genre of music, what would they sound like?  The token idea here is that you are finding your characters aesthetic through music. 

For example, my character Roland is an overthinking ISTJ who loves horticulture, schedules, and occasionally singing when no one's around. Instead of choosing music that is dark and heavy or slow and dragging for him, I decided on acoustic and indie folk, since he is a "Donny Downer" type, but also a nature lover with a off-kilter since of humor. 

Really think about the essence of your character.

Music make you lose gain control.

When choosing songs for your characters, it's important to remember the impact that music can have while you are writing. There's tons of articles you can find online that talk about how influential music is to writers. How it can help you focus, inspire and encourage you to continue working on something you started to get bored with, or motivate you to finish things that you've neglected. I've heard the best is lukewarm ambient instrumental (not so great sounding it distracts you, but not bad to the point it also distracts you), but here's more to it than that, I believe. 

While I write, I either listen to the songs I chose for the characters that are in the scene I'm writing, or I listen to Epic Score/Cinematic music that I feel fits the scene. Writing without that foundation of music in the background has actually proved to be more difficult to me. 

Having music with a perfect fit to your story and characters to listen to as you write can totally immerse you into the scene you are writing. 

I'm an illustrator and visual person, so when I create stories, I usually think up the scenes in terms of screenplay, camera angles, and staging at the start, so having the actual audio of score music (that isn't associated with a movie or tv show that already exists) to the hypothetical movie I'm creating helps to make it feel more real. 

This helps to keep me mindful of not only the aesthetic/atmosphere of the scene I'm writing, but what the characters are doing, how they are acting in the scene, and interacting with each other. simply because it forces me to imagine how they are going to be moving and staged throughout the scene in tangent with the music. 

As a sidenote, I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with listening to songs that are in the "so great sounding it distracts you" category, if they are songs relating to your characters/story. That way, if or when you are distracted by the music, you will still be thinking about your characters/story and keep your focus on that.

And there you have it. Some ideas for how to get started finding the perfect songs for your characters! 

Remember that songs can have multiple meanings and just because the lyrics of a song sounds one way, doesn't mean it can't mean something else. And that something else might be something that your character can relate to. 

That perfect song can come from anywhere, you just have to be willing to listen.

Happy Writing!