The Playlist Behind the Pages: Music as a Writing Tool

I can’t write in silence. I’ve tried. The words come out flat, like dialogue delivered in an empty theatre. Something’s missing — not volume, exactly, but frequency. The emotional frequency of the scene.

Music fixes that for me. Not as background noise, but as a creative tool that’s become as essential to my process as coffee and deadline panic.

Scene Scoring

When I’m drafting a scene, I almost always have a specific song on repeat. Not a playlist — a single track, looping, sometimes for hours. The song isn’t there to inspire the scene (usually the scene already exists in my head). It’s there to keep me in the emotional register I need.

A tense confrontation gets something with a driving beat and minor key. A quiet, intimate moment gets something stripped back — piano, a single vocal line, space between the notes. A scene where everything falls apart gets the kind of song that makes you stare out of a window on a train and feel like you’re in a film.

The trick is matching the emotional temperature, not the lyrical content. I’m not looking for a song about what’s happening in the scene. I’m looking for a song that feels like what’s happening in the scene.

Character Playlists

Each major character in the Stolen Romance series has their own playlist. Not just songs they’d listen to (though that’s part of it), but songs that capture their emotional arc — where they start, how they change, what they’re afraid of, what they want.

This might sound indulgent, but it’s genuinely useful. When I’m struggling to find a character’s voice in a scene, I put on their playlist and something clicks. The rhythm of their dialogue shifts. Their internal monologue finds its register. Music bypasses the analytical part of my brain and goes straight to the emotional core of the character.

I’ve shared some of these playlists with readers, and the response has been one of my favourite parts of publishing. There’s something beautiful about a reader listening to the same song I was listening to when I wrote that scene, and feeling the same thing I felt. It’s a shared emotional language that exists outside the text.

Writing Rhythm

Beyond emotional tone, music affects the actual rhythm of my prose. I’ve noticed that the pace of the song I’m listening to directly influences my sentence length, my paragraph breaks, the way dialogue flows.

Write to something slow and lyrical, and the prose gets longer, more contemplative, more willing to sit in a feeling. Write to something fast and urgent, and the sentences clip. The paragraphs shorten. Everything accelerates.

I don’t fight this. I lean into it. Because the reading experience has a rhythm too — and when the rhythm of the prose matches the emotional momentum of the scene, readers feel it even if they can’t name why.

A Note for Fellow Writers

If you don’t already use music in your writing process, I’d genuinely encourage you to try it. Not as wallpaper, but deliberately. Before you start a scene, ask yourself: what does this scene sound like? Then find the track that matches and let it carry you.

You might be surprised at how much it unlocks. Music has a way of giving you permission to feel things fully — and that permission is exactly what you need when you’re trying to write something that will make a stranger feel something too.

A. B. Jackson is an LGBTQ+ rockstar romance author with an original soundtrack recorded at Metropolis Studios. Find the Stolen Romance series playlist on Spotify and start reading with the free prequel novella, Stolen Nights, at abjackson.com.