Ok, I just realized that I really do have a decent amount of stuff to talk about on my blog but if I don’t post RIGHT NOW my sieve of a brain is going to forget.  So here I go.

It appears that a current trend now is putting a soundtrack to your novel, and then possibly “casting” it.  Am I the only one that doesn’t do this?

One, I write in silence so I don’t have any music that actually inspires the work that I write.  And two, I just don’t correlate music to my work after the fact.  I mean, it takes a lot of brain power for me to sift through songs and attach them to my work, mainly because I can’t remember anything!

I’ve only had one piece of work where the soundtrack wrote itself and it was for a piece of fanfiction.  The music fell into place and it was perfect.  Everything else?  I’ve had to spend the time seeking out songs, listening to the lyrics, maybe they fit, maybe they don’t.  I just don’t like wasting that kind of effort and for what?  So my story has a soundtrack?  Yeah, it can be fun but . . . what’s the point?  I blame Stephenie Meyer for popularizing this because she did it for her pieces of trash books.  She is to blame for all the evil in the world.

And as for casting, I see that as another wasted effort.  Sure, it’s fun . . . but why?  I mean, I can see how it would spurn the creative process but I don’t know about you, but my characters look like themselves, not any actors or actresses.  Yeah, every once in a while I’ll come across a relatively unknown, or not crazily publicized, actor and think he’d be great in a role for one of my characters.  But other than that, I can’t put a face to a character that already has a distinct face.  They’d be nothing more than a substitute and I’m afraid my characters would hurt me if I chose wrong.

Do you do either of these things?  What do you get out of it?  Does it benefit your work at all or is it a kind of procrastination method for you?  Or is it just something fun?