In the past, I’ve mostly needed silence to write. The only exception: I’ve sometimes used a “theme song” to focus my mind on a specific project — one song that I’d play on repeat for fifteen or twenty minutes as I settled into a writing session. But I haven’t found an effective theme song for the Inverted Frontier books.

So several weeks ago, I was complaining to a friend that I often had a hard time focusing on the day’s work and she suggested Brain.fm — “Functional Music to Improve Focus.” This friend is a successful nonfiction writer, and she felt that Brain.fm had helped her to be far more productive.

The first five sessions are free, so I tried it.

After those first sessions, I bought a three-month subscription.

Does it help? Yes, I think it does. I don’t listen to it every time I sit down to write, but I’ve listened to it a lot, and I feel like it helped me power through to the end of the first draft of Silver. And I’ve definitely noticed that when my mind goes spiraling off on a sequence of depressing career thoughts, I just have to plug in and it will pull me back into the work.

Real music distracts me. It draws me away from the work. My attention turns to melodies and lyrics. Brain.fm is entirely different. I don’t really listen to it — not with the conscious part of my brain — instead it seems to occupy that part of my mind that likes to fuss and worry over things.

Is it a placebo? Maybe . . . but I’m happy to pay for a placebo that works! 😉

Update: I meant to say that when I use Brain.fm, I generally listen to it for a half hour to an hour at the start of my writing day. That seems to do the trick.