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I don't listen to music while I write. Frankly, I don't see how anyone can. Since all style is rhythm, and since I cannot write anything that's as clear and simple and still as the truth, needing instead to perpetrate my own Stomp!-style foolishness across the page — I can't be bumping, say, OJ da Juiceman while drafting. I have to apportion all my ear-strength for sussing out the short-long-short-short issuing from the poor soul trapped behind the walls of my skull.

That being said, I listened to music whenever I wasn't writing I Am Sorry to Think That I Have Raised a Timid Son. I'm always listening to music. Is it good music? Jesus, no. It's god-awful music. I understand this, and I take full ownership of the fact. I also understand that there are about seven million white dudes with glasses just wishing that they had this platform from which to broadcast their discretionary taste and consumptive self-worth. They'd post a bunch of Bobby Womack B-sides or something. But me, I use bad pop as my smelling salt. ...

The eight songs on this playlist didn't "inspire" The Buried Giant, nor did I play them out loud while writing. And with the notable exception of the Arvo Part, the visual landscapes conjured up by these tracks are unlikely to match the setting of the novel. But each of them relates in some significant way — usually at the level of theme or emotion — to what happens in the story. I'm not going to spell out just how — I'll leave that to you. But let me say a little about why each song is special for me.

1. "Hickory Wind" by Emmylou Harris
There's a great subgenre of songs about homesickness, in which we're left unsure just what it is the singer is really missing. A place? A person? Or maybe an era of his or her life spent there? I love it when a song deliberately plays on this ambiguity. "Georgia on My Mind" is a classic example. (Georgia, of course, could be the place or a woman's name.) The wonderful Irish weepie, "The Mountains of Mourne" ...

I absolutely love writing to music. Even now, as I write this playlist, I'm listening to J. Cole's 2014 Forest Hills Drive. As I wrote my first book, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, music was in heavy rotation — I needed the perfect balance of music that was upbeat (to stop me from jumping head first out of the glass windows of the coffee shop, where I wrote) and soothingly encouraging (for those moments when I was either blocked or on a roll). Below, you'll find my most frequently played songs.

1. "Flight of the Navigator" by Childish Gambino
I basically had this whole album (Because the Internet) on repeat, but this song in particular fit into the "soothing" category. It's so beautiful and haunting and really helped me during those moments when I needed to just sit back and reminisce.

2. "Haunted" by Beyoncé
The Beyoncé album had just dropped right when I decided to start getting serious about writing this book. I would immediately skip "Pretty Hurts," and this song would put me in the proper ...

When I started writing The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins, I went through my usual routine of making a music playlist to immerse myself in and help me find the characters. As the two main narrators in the book are women, I decided it would be best to concentrate on female singers and "voices" in general, so I stuck with female recording artists, with a strong bias towards singer-songwriters. They were all helpful to the process, as musicians always are. After a few plays, and along with other research materials, Lucy and Lena started to form in my head.

I did have a playlist that I listened to over and over again while I was writing Glow, but three years on I'm a bit bored of those songs, which got their final blast at my book party in London last year. So here are the B-sides, so to speak: other good songs by the same artists.

1. "MTI" by Koreless
This is an extraordinarily simple song that feels like it could carry on into eternity. Koreless was right at the top of my playlist, and with them I managed to achieve a sort of Pavlovian response to put myself into the right mind set.

2. "Far Nearer" by Jamie xx
I deliberately didn't specify what kind of music is being played at the raves in the book, but in my imagination it's futuristic and unbound by genre, just like this song. The last time I went clubbing in London was to see Jamie xx DJing at Dance Tunnel in Dalston.

3. "Obedear" by Purity Ring
I noticed that BJ Novak also put a song from this album on his playlist. Perhaps it has ...

Migratory Animals is mostly set in Texas during the first years of the most recent recession, when the cast of characters — an eclectic group of college friends now in their 30s — are coming to the realization that, in a world of shrinking resources, a good education is no longer enough to ensure an escape from one's origins. This playlist is chronological, not necessarily from release date but rather from when the songs become important in the characters' lives.

1. "Papa Noel" by Brenda Lee (1958)
This is one of the songs on the curated cassette tape entitled, "Larry Blevins' Christmas Bluegrass Jamboree" that Flannery and Molly's father plays on car trips to Dallas in the novel's flashbacks. Despite the fact that West Texas is not "on the bayou," Flannery always loved this song because it reflected what Christmas was like in the mostly snowless South.

2. "Cannonball" by the Breeders (1993)
The Breeders' show in Lubbock was Flannery's first concert when she was in high school. This band's songs walked the line between catchy and indie while also demonstrating how ...

I once told a medical-profession-type lady that I didn't sleep well, that I awoke all through the night and was awake for hours. "What do you do when that happens?" she asked. I said I lie there listening to music and thinking. "Thinking about what?" she asked. I said everything, but mainly about whatever I'm writing. Said she, "Don't worry about not sleeping — you're writing. It's part of your process." And so I awake, I grab my iPod, I listen to that week's or month's playlist, I think, I sit up and flip on the lamp and make fuzzy-eyed notes: the perfect word I couldn't find earlier, a new patch of dialogue, a major plot turn. This here playlist is cobbled together from some of the songs I remember not sleeping to as I scribbled down bits and pieces of Descent.

1. "Young Americans" by David Bowie
This is one of the few songs I never get tired of hearing, and when I was writing the scene in which a bunch of old veterans take my young male protagonist under ...

My book Here has just been released; it is a graphic novel that shows one location, a suburban living room, over the span of billions of years. The book is loosely based around my childhood home. While preparing this playlist, it occurred to me how we all get branded by the music we grew up with; the older we get, the less new music finds its way in. We all tend to stick to our musical roots. For me that is mostly centered on British Invasion Pop of the '60s. I also found myself thinking of the chain of inspiration that happens with music, the passing of the torch. Simply by searching my iPod for songs with the word "time" in the title, I was surprised by the core sample it created of my own musical history.

1. "Any Time at All" by the Beatles (1964)
I was seven years old in 1964. I had a little transistor radio that my grandfather had given me that I would listen to well into the night. I was very aware of the Beatles ...

These are the songs that wake me up, take me out of my worries and anxieties, wash my brain cells, and send me to the keyboard to write with new vigor.

1. "It's My Life" by Bon Jovi
This is a song I associate with my beloved vampire hero, Lestat, today. I imagine Lestat loving it, singing it and playing it on his guitar. I see him riding his Harley, listening to it on his iPhone through his ear buds. I listened to it morning after morning before going to my desk to work on Prince Lestat. It shakes me up, sends me to work with optimism and spirit.

2. "Living on a Prayer" by Bon Jovi
Another great hit that I find inspiring. Again, when I hear this, I see my hero, Lestat, singing and dancing with the Bon Jovi sound.

3. "I Hate Myself for Loving You" by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts
Love the pounding beat of this and Joan Jett's powerful voice. Listening to this one always gets my creative juices going. Good for the ...

We "see" when we read, and we "see" when we listen. There are many ways in which music can create the cross-sensory experience of this seeing... through sonic imitation, through poetic evocation, through dynamic mapping, through programmatic association, through the literal use of physical materials...

1. "La Mer" by Claude Debussy
The big kahuna of classical "water musics." So painterly in its orchestrational detail. The big move here by Debussy is paralleling the idea of a swelling of physical volume (a cresting wave) with a swelling of aural volume (a crescendo). In this mapping, louder=fuller.

2. "Sea Interludes" by Benjamin Britten

3. "Ondine" from Gaspard de la Nuit by Maurice Ravel
The piano is particularly suited, in its instrumental color, to evoking water; specifically the sound of the tinkling, chiming of water drops. Here we have one of Ravel's programmatic water pieces, based on a poem by Aloysius Bertrand:

Listen! — Listen! — It is I, it is Ondine who brushes drops of water on the resonant panes of your windows lit by the gloomy rays of the moon; and here in gown of watered silk,

...