We writers are an interesting breed. Our minds splinter easily, branching into a hundred directions, chasing tangents we didn’t know existed until we found ourselves halfway down them. Some days end with nothing but fragments: half-thoughts, abandoned metaphors, and ideas that never quite made it to paper. This is a stereotype, sure, but it's not an entirely inaccurate one.

Which is why when it comes to giving our chaos a soundtrack, we usually prefer silence. Sorting out the thoughts and sounds inside our head can be tedious work and the process itself mechanic, which can sometimes create its own music in your head. 

And yet, music and writing have always been quietly intertwined. I see albums as books themselves, novels with an enticing first act, a good heart second one and third act that ends with purpose. No songs on an album are ordered without intention, there’s a reason why 'Portrait of A Time' by Peter Cat Recording Co. begins with a song like 'Hail Piano' that leads you in to the album softly. There's no rush as it paces itself for what’s to come. It ends with 'Happiness', a song that is both cynical and whistful, bringing the album to an apt close.

This is perhaps why, even in our pursuit of silence, we keep returning to music. Not as a distraction, but as a source of inspiration. We turned to five homegrown authors and asked them: what music has stayed with you as a writer?

For Ria Chopra, the author of 'Never Logged Out', a collection of essays that dive into the relationship between us, and the stratosphere that is the internet, silence is usually essential. “While writing itself, I prefer to write in silence,” she says. “But sometimes if I'm working late and everything is too quiet, I'll put on some mellow music to write to. Then, it's mostly Hindi songs — I write in English, so if I listen to English music while writing, my words get mixed up. So Bollywood it is — a lot of AR Rahman, Bollywood from the 2000s etc.” 

But what we listen to deeply influences what we write, just as writing reshapes our listening habits. For example the other day, I was writing a piece about a Marathi pop culture festival and all I wanted to listen to during and after were the Marathi songs from the 2000s I’d listened to while going to school. Similarly for Chopra that relationship between sound and subject is intuitive. “I write about contemporary life and times, so I listen to a lot of contemporary pop music, mostly written and sung by women, because I think they're also describing the same experience as I am but in a different way and medium. That in particular is my most-listened-to music.” 

When it comes to choosing a soundtrack for her own book, her picks reflect that same emotional and thematic complexity: 'Melodrama' by Lorde and 'brat' by Charli XCX. “Both for their messy, complex thematic material, as well as the experimental storytelling throughout,” she says.

In the times when it does not take over, Karuna Ezra Parikh enjoys having a soundtrack to her writing process. “It's often instrumental, so that the lyrics don't interrupt the words, but I usually choose music based on the mood I'm trying to create at the time, on the page,” she adds that, “Emotions are heightened for me while writing with music, and it's important for me to go back to the scene and re-read it several times without the music playing, to check what has been transferred and what has perhaps not been added enough.”

While working on 'The Heart Asks Pleasure First', her debut novel, Parikh found herself returning to the compositions of Michael Nyman for the film 'The Piano', especially the track that shares a name with her title. “Both our pieces of art”, she points out, “ take their title from an Emily Dickinson poem, and I adore that kind of intertextuality.” Another work that has stayed with her is 'An American Prayer' by The Doors and Jim Morrison, an album that merges poetry and music in a way that reshaped how she thinks about rhythm in writing. It showed her how a novel, too, can move like a song —  structured by cadence.

While imagining a soundtrack to her novel, Parikh does not give us just one song but puts together an entire library. She says,“ For my novel, if I had to — pardon the old expression — burn a CD or create a mixtape, I suspect it would have everything on it from The Rolling Stones to Lata Mangeshkar to Tchaikovsky. But isn't that what a good bookshelf is in the end? A collection of all our passions.”

Even though Meghana Pant states that she does not listen to music while writing, music, especially classical music has shaped how she understands storytelling and the unfolding of a narrative. She says, “Take 'Raga Yaman' at dusk or 'Bhairav' at dawn: neither rushes toward climax. The alaap lingers, circles, deepens, revealing emotion layer by layer. That slow unveiling mirrors how I approach storytelling; a character must be revealed like a raga, not declared like a headline.”

Similarly, the restrained emotional depth of ghazals by artists such as Begum Akhtar and Jagjit Singh has shaped her sensitivity to silence within dialogue, what remains unsaid often carrying more weight than what is spoken. She even recalls listening to Mehdi Hassan’s 'Ranjish Hi Sahi' as a moment that redefined how she approached emotional scenes.

Imagining her work alongside music, Pant describes her piece 'Boys Don’t Cry', a novel based on a deeply emotional true story of domestic abuse and violence,as sitting beside a slow alaap in 'Raga Lalit'. “ Like Lalit, the novel inhabits a psychological twilight: a story of domestic violence, survival, and a woman who crosses moral boundaries without spectacle or apology. The music and the book belong together because both refuse loud judgement; they unfold slowly, revealing tension through restraint rather than drama.”

“To start, I need silence,” says Priya Guns, while talking about her creative process. But once she enters the world of her story, from the characters to the plot, music becomes essential. “A song gives life outside of my brain. Music helps me visualise. I have another way into my characters’ inner and outer world, and the song keeps me anchored to that,” she says.

Music also shapes the emotional texture of her work. Some songs help her draw out feeling when a scene feels distant, while others set the tone entirely. There are tracks she turns to for intensity, others for softness, and many that exist somewhere in between, holding a sense of contradiction.

Growing up one of Guns' major influences and inspirations was a less than obvious literary figure: Eminem. She says, “Eminem didn’t give a fuck, and he reminded us: 'Just Don’t Give a Fuck and Still Don’t Give a Fuck'. That audaciousness and hilarity. He was spicy, cute, and funny. I was 13 and he was self-aware. He taught me about the use of a stage and pen name, the reach we can have as storytellers and the contestation and discussion sparked by art when it comes to censorship. Who is involved? What is their message? I was inspired by Eminem’s tenacity.”

It follows, then, that the perfect musical accompaniment for her upcoming book 'Hustle, Baby' would be 'The Slim Shady LP', an album that mirrors the same irreverence, tension, and dark humour that she threads through her work.

Tashan Mehta, the author of fantasy novel ‘Mad Sisters of Esi’ states that even though she doesn't write with music as she puts it, she does have tracks that she associates with the book she’s working and that she’ll go back to when she feels like she’s in a rut or needs to feel the emotional essence of the book better.

She explains that there isn’t one specific artist or genre that shapes her writing — it shifts with each book she works on. Speaking of her current picks, she points, “Currently, I’m a little in love with Florence and the Machine's 'King', 'Free' " and 'Girls Against Gods', paired with Soap&Skin’s 'Italy' and Vampire Weekend’s 'Sympathy'.

As an accompaniment to her second novel, 'Mad Sisters of Esi', Tashan Mehta picks 'Time in a Bottle' by Jim Croce and 'Sing, Sing, Sing (Remastered)' by Benny Goodman. She says, “The first is the emotional heart of the novel— the beating core of its yearning —and the second captures the tone and pace of the book (it also features in the story, though it’s never named).”  I’ve always found it fascinating to pair a fantasy novel with music. I remember reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time while my mother played a CD by flautist Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia as she cooked. As the music filled the room, I found myself slipping deeper into the world of the book. For a brief moment there — the backdrop for the Shire in New Zealand and my mother’s kitchen in Pune — those two distant worlds felt inexplicably connected.

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