If you do a quick Google search for quotes on music and writing, you will come up with a vast array of musings from a wide range of writers. It seems that music and writing go well together, no matter what form they take.

Think, for instance, at how well the right piece of music can elevate something that’s happening on TV, or how some pieces of music just seem to fit perfectly with certain books. We can’t always explain why they go together so well, we just know that they do.

If you look at all of those quotes to do with music and writing, one of the things that comes up multiple times is the fact that music sometimes has the ability to express what words do not. For example, look at Rilke’s poem about music that says of the subject: “you language where all language ends.” Or this quote from Victor Hugo: “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and cannot remain silent.”

It’s something that I imagine most writers are familiar with: we often know what we want to say, we just don’t know how best to say it. Then we hear a piece of music that evokes perfectly what we are trying to convey. Sometimes hearing the music makes it easier to write what we mean to say, sometimes it doesn’t, but either way the music and the writing go together well.

The slight irony here is that plenty of writers can’t write while music is playing. It can be distracting and irritating when you’re trying to focus on something. Yet music is something that most of us love, and it can have an influence on us even when we don’t realise it.

What do you think? Is your writing influenced by music, and do you think it can have an effect on the way writing is perceived?