Ambience Sounds for Writing Fantasy + Playlists

If you’ve been following my blog for a good while, you may have noticed that I like to talk a lot about listening to film scores while writing and how the emotions composed specifically for movie scenes could also be used while writing similar scenes in your story. Up until a few days ago, however, I had no idea that fantasy ambience/white noise existed, and when I did, I set out to find some of the best background noises that could be used for the appropriate scenes.

I discovered this magic when a Twitter profile called Fantasy Realm sporting a profile picture of a cute little cartoon wizard followed me. I had no idea what it was, but the words “Here you can listen to you favorite fantasy places” in their Twitter bio translated as “FIND AWESOMENESS HERE” to my mind, so I gave it a try. Turns out, they have a YouTube channel of fantasy ambience/white noise sounds specifically for writing. As a fantasy and sci-fi writer who believes in the magic of film scores to help me write, I fell in love with the fantasy background sounds. (Particularly the medieval inns/taverns, those are just so. cool.) I found a few other YouTube channels with similar white noise videos pretty soon I had some writing playlists set up.

I simply couldn’t wait to try setting my mental environment with the new fantasy ambience videos I found. In fact, the next day, I was taking notes while listening to a podcast and decided to turn on the new YouTube playlist I created while working on the notes. So I listened to some homeschool moms talk about parenting with the sounds of dishes rattling and a crackling fire in a medieval fantasy tavern. It was very amusing.

I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun and inspiration bombs while on YouTube before. I discovered videos of ambience sounds for medieval fantasy taverns and inns, forests with birds near a village, swamp sounds at night with frog croaks, crickets, and nature sounds, celtic medieval tavern music with background chatter, pirate ship ambience, crackling fireplaces with howling wind, river campfire, rain sounds from indoors, waterfall and bird sounds in a garden atmosphere, medieval fantasy village ambience, Rivendell sounds with waterfall, Elvish song, and birds, environment sounds for Hogwarts library with fire crackling and rain pouring, the Hogwarts train, the Three Broomsticks, a dragon sleeping/snoring, and even an army marching. I also found some Star Wars and sci-fi ambience sounds, such as the Coruscant apartment background, the “Voyager” crew quarters from Star Trek, the USS Enterprise engine hum, and space battle background. Here, check out the three playlists I found.

Fantasy Writing Sounds

Sci-Fi Sounds

Pirate Ship Sounds

Also, some really awesome YouTubers who make pretty cool fantasy and sci-fi white noise backgrounds:

The ASMR Geek

Fantasy Realm

Darkwing Captures

The Guild of Ambience

ASMR Rooms

I’m still discovering channels with fantasy ambience sounds, but I can’t wait to start writing while listening to them. What are some of your favorite white noises to listen to while writing? I would love to check out all the ambience background atmospheres; hey, they’re fun to listen to even while reading or working. Go forth to listen! And write. Cheers!

 

Twenty One Pilots and Expessing Your Belief Through Art

The song “Stressed Out” by Twenty One Pilots was put on my mental list of “questionable songs that might be good.” Only until recently, it was moved up to my mental list of “Personal Top 21 Songs.”

Okay, maybe not 21, but somewhere around that number. Shortly afterward, Twenty One Pilots became one of my six favorite music artists. Being a music freak who likes so many different types of music, making the top 6 is saying something. But it wasn’t just the music or the genre (if you could use the word “genre” in relevance to this particular band) that I liked about them. It was what they stood for and how their faith and encouragement to others showed in their lyrics and even the style of music. As a writer, this excited me way more than it probably should have. It was all I could talk about (and post on Facebook) for a few days.

Plot Bunnies and What to Do With Them

The amount of time that has passed since I last wrote a blog post didn’t really hit me until I noticed the age of my featured post. Now, (a month and a half later) I decided to get my act together and delve back into the groove of posting on the blog weekly. Starting with something that I feel very strongly about: Plot bunnies.

Plot bunnies. They seem really cute and soft and loveable at first, but they turn out to be much more ferocious than they seemed. As a writer, I’ve learned how to encounter plot bunnies, tame them, and save them for later when the time is right. Name a writer who never struggled with plot bunnies. Hard, eh?

Aesthetic Boards for Writers: A Guest Post by Harley Rae

This is Susannah, jumping in really quick to introduce this guest post by Harley Rae. I have been ridiculously busy in the last several weeks, what with school, musical theater, etc. that I haven’t been able to post for a long time. Thankfully, the amazing human Harley was willing to lighten the burden of this dangerous dilemma by writing up something awesome for this Tuesday to learn from and enjoy!

Michael’s Movie Mentions: Storytelling Similarities in Movies and Writing

Did you know that, in many ways, the art of making movies (visual storytelling) is often similar to the art of writing? How the director and director of photography choose to portray a story by way of camera is, believe it or not, comparable to some extent with writing books. And that is what I will be doing in this post: showing the similarities in the psychology of camera storytelling (movies) and storytelling by way of written word (your favorite book, for example). This similarity may stem from the fact that Storytelling is a universal art, developed over the millennia of mankind. Movies and the written word are merely different categories of storytelling, so it makes sense that there would be many similarities between the two. I will show you just a few of them in this post.

Thoughts on the Anime “Your Name”

Yesterday, Hannah Heath and I went to see the anime Your Name. It was released in Japan in 2016 and it went over so well, they wisely decided to release it in the United States also. It got a whopping 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. That, and the fact that it was about a body swap (a concept I’d always dreamed of experiencing or writing about) ultimately helped me in deciding to go. The trailer looked pretty too, so overall, I was pretty stoked. It should be a fairly good movie, right?

Wrong. Oh, I was so wrong.

It was AMAZING.

 

11 Tips for Character Development

Your plot is ready to go. You have a protagonist, an antagonist, a secondary character, an old mentor, a love interest, a traitor, an opposed parent, a jealous sibling, and an intelligent talking horse named Phillip. Hopefully, by the time you sit down to start writing the first chapter of your first draft, you have a general idea of what your cast of characters is like. Well at least you’ll know the gender of your main character. Ideally.

I believe the most important thing that will help you achieve a well developed story is a well developed cast of characters; the story is about those characters, after all. Probably the most crucial question to ask when developing a character is “what are the character’s motives?” The protagonist’s motives alone will drive the plot forward, but when you add the antagonist’s desires, the traitor’s secrets, the mentor’s wishes, along with the protagonist’s motives, the story will automatically become so much more detailed and complex. And complexity is a good thing. Not only will it make the reader think, but it will make each character believable: all their trials, emotions, fails, and triumphs will be real, thus drawing the reader into a deeper level of identifying with each of them. It may be scary at first to think that strangers who happen to be reading your story will connect with your babies if you do a good job, but if your readers don’t connect, what is your story worth? Without a developed cast of characters, it will be hard to connect with them, thus we will feel nothing at their fails, triumphs, or emotions, and thus the message or theme of the story you want to convey through your characters will never be understood by your readers.