I grew up as a classical musician—years of theory, composition, performance training, the whole disciplined mess of it. I spent my teenage years dissecting Bach fugues and analyzing harmonic progressions, understanding how a single note choice could shift an entire emotional landscape. That foundation never left me, even when I traded my instrument for a laptop and started writing monsters instead of sonatas.

These days, I channel that training into something a little less conventional: writing original compositions for my characters. Full songs. Lyrics, melodies, the works. I've been composing pieces that belong to specific characters or moments in my books—theme songs that exist beyond the page. And once I finally crawl out from under the mountain of back catalog chaos I'm currently buried in, I'm planning to record and upload them all. Because why not? If my vampire lord gets a three-page internal monologue, he deserves his own haunting ballad too.

But before I get there—before any of that music sees the light of day—there's the process that makes it all possible.

One of my quirky writer habits is building playlists for my characters before I write them. Some writers do character sheets. Some do detailed backstories or visual mood boards. I do mood boards and playlists, and the playlists always come first.

For a spicy dragon romance, I might start with songs about power, desire, and danger—something with a driving beat, heavy bass, lyrics that feel like a challenge or a dare. For a cozy paranormal heroine, I'm pulling indie-folk and witchy acoustic vibes: soft vocals, organic instrumentation, something that feels like morning light filtering through curtains. For a morally grey antagonist, I'm looking for dissonance—songs that sound beautiful but have unsettling lyrics, or tracks that shift unexpectedly halfway through.

Here's why this works for me: music reveals the unspoken parts of character in ways that a description never quite can.

A song choice tells you how a character sees themselves, how they move through the world, what they're afraid to say out loud. It gives you their rhythm, their pacing, the texture of their inner life. When I'm stuck on a scene, I'll pull up that character's playlist and let it guide me back into their headspace. The music becomes a shortcut to their emotional truth.

And because I come from a compositional background, I hear these playlists differently than I might have otherwise. I'm not just listening to lyrics or vibes—I'm listening to structure. Tempo. Key changes. The way a bridge shifts the emotional weight of a song. The way a minor chord can make even a happy melody feel bittersweet. That training seeps into how I write scenes, how I pace emotional beats, how I build tension and release it.

Writing is composition. Just with words instead of notes.

So when I sit down to write an original song for a character, it's not just a fun side project—it's an extension of the same process. I'm taking everything I know about that character's playlist, their emotional arc, their secrets and fears, and distilling it into something that could only belong to them. A love song from the perspective of a character who doesn't believe in love. A villain's anthem that makes you almost sympathize with them. A lullaby that's actually a warning.

Once the back catalog nightmare is over and I can breathe again, those songs are going up. Recorded, mixed, ready for anyone who wants to hear what my characters and stories feel like with notes and bad composition.

If you're a writer, try building a playlist before you write your next character. Not a general "book playlist," but something specific to them. What do they listen to when they're alone? What song plays in their head during their worst moment? Their best? What would their theme song sound like if this were a movie?

If you're a reader, try building one for your favorite character from a book you love and see what it reveals. You might be surprised how much a handful of songs can tell you about someone who only exists on paper.

I think you'll find that music and character are closer cousins than you'd expect. They both live in the space between what's said and what's felt. They both ask you to listen for the things that aren't obvious. They both have the power to break your heart in under four minutes.

And if you do it right, they both stay with you long after the final note fades.