6 More Playlists to Write By: Southern Gothic, Romantic Yearning, an Australian Roadtrip, Digital Worlds, Espionage, and Dystopia
| by Pamela Koehne-Drube | Writing
If a character playlist gets you inside someone's head, a setting playlist gets you inside a place, whether that's the humidity, the static, or the rumble of a motor on a road that doesn't seem to end. Sometimes the fastest way into a scene is the right handful of tracks playing before you sit down to right. So here are six very different playlists built to inspire your writing week.
Writing Southern Gothic
Southern Gothic runs on decay dressed up as manners. Old houses, older secrets, a family that smiles at dinner and says nothing true. This playlist is built for haunted houses, hellfire preachers, and family secrets buried out past the tree line. It's decay that still shows up looking respectable at church on Sunday.
Writing Romantic Yearning
This is the playlist for the not-quite, the almost-said, the hand that hovers an inch from ever truly touching. Yearning works because it withholds, so write to this one when your characters are circling each other and you need to feel the distance yourself.
Writing an Australian Roadtrip
Australia is vast, so there's a lot of distance, red dirt, dead-straight highways, a horizon that refuses to get any closer. But there's also friendship, crowded beaches, and trendy city cafes. This one runs the full, unruly range of it. This playlist is for long drives through the Australian landscape, very long highways, a car full of friends, and lots of snacks.
Writing Digital Worlds
Whether it's a game world, a simulation, or a near-future internet gone strange, digital settings need to feel both realistic but slightly wrong; too clean in some places, glitching at the seams in others. This playlist is the soundtrack for simulations and virtual cities, for characters who trust the system right up until they wake up and see it working against their interests.
Writing Espionage
Espionage is a genre of control. Every line of dialogue means two things, every character is performing calm they don't feel. The tension isn't in the action scenes so much as the scenes right before them: the handoffs, the surveillance, the moment someone realises they're being watched from the shadows. A playlist filled with tension, class, and pinch of romance.
Writing Dystopian Worlds
Dystopia works best as a low hum. The horror is in what's been normalised, not what's currently on fire. This playlist if for people making a life in a setting of quiet, grinding wrongness, with rules nobody questions anymore, hope rationed out in small doses, and a nostaliga for what used to be.
Looking for more playlists? Check out the collection here or search for Novlr on Spotify and give us a follow! Want us to curate some more playlists? Let us know what you'd like to see!
