The Soundtracks of your Stories

by Leanna Renee Hieber

I don't know about you, but I cannot write without music in the background. That being said I’m very particular about what I can listen to while actually writing as opposed to the type of music that simply inspires me. And what inspires me versus what I can write to is often very different things.



My favourites come down to the following artists (Most of my Strangely Beautiful series thus far has been written and will be edited with these in the background): Philip Glass (Particularly his symphonies and soundtracks like The Hours, The Illusionist, Dracula)

Linford Detweiler. One half of one of my favourite bands, Over the Rhine, Linford has created three albums of achingly beautiful piano music that is perfect to create by.

Outside of sitting down to write, for me, music has inspired specific scenes, words, characters, dialogue and more in my books. A great deal of The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker had influences from the band picture to the left: VNV Nation, a Goth-Electronica band out of England. While they don't sound a thing like the 19th century, they have crafted such energizing club music and such wonderful atmospheric music. The lyrics of my favourite song “Beloved” proved very inspirational.

While I cannot have music with lyrics playing while I’m actually writing, listening to music that accesses that sweeping sense of a movie trailer, music that allows me to play the movie of my book in images as the song washes over me, is really important for my engagement in the project. This is the music I listen to on the subway, to keep me connected to my faraway and fantastical worlds, ready for me to open them up again when I sit down to write, this music having primed me to dive back in again to that private world and forge the next adventure.

What about you? Do you have a writing soundtrack? What's it like?


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Leanna Renee Hieber is an occasional actress, award-winning playwright and author of THE STRANGELY BEAUTIFUL TALE OF MISS PERCY PARKER, the debut of her Strangely Beautiful series of Gothic Victorian Fantasy novels from Leisure Books / Dorchester Publishing 8/25/09. Her novella Dark Nest is a finalist in the 2009 Prism Awards for excellence in fantasy, futuristic and paranormal romance.