The Writing Journey Through Music

By Trina Boice

My eyelids were drooping and every part of my body was aching last weekend as I sat in front of my computer screen for hours, scrambling to make a deadline my publisher had given me to finish my latest manuscript. I felt tired and uninspired, yet determined to finish.

What do you do for inspiration and motivation to keep hacking away at the keyboard? Well, I'm so excited about my latest discovery that I just have to tell you about it! Have you heard of http://www.pandora.com/ ? I absolutely love it and I have it to thank for keeping me on task with my last writing project!

It's like a music radio station online, except without all of the annoying commercial breaks and songs you don't like. You simply tell it what songs you like and it creates a custom station just for you! Best of all, it's free!

To get back some energy I plugged myself into the "Journey" channel and suddenly felt a surge of writing strength overcome me. Yeah, I'm dating myself, but Journey is one of my favorite bands of all time. Thankfully, they're making a come-back with their 2009 tour, so now I won't seem so old, right? I hear their new singer, Arnel, is blowing everyone away. Sure love that Steve Perry...

When I needed to think harder and work on the more spiritual parts of the book I switched to the "Yanni" and "Enya" channels. Perfect. I even created my own "Wicked" and "Dream Girls" channels when I wanted to sing out loud while I continued typing away.

Pandora.com declares itself as a music genome project that began in the year 2000. They've grouped songs together by sound, rather than genre, making for a very nice collection that appears to be able to identify my taste spot on.

I used to be one of those writers who prefers silence as their writing companion, but now I'm converted to Pandora.com! What do YOU do for inspiration?