Several years ago, one of my writing buddies asked me if I had a playlist for the novel-in-progress.

“A what?” I asked. “Is that a thing?”

Turns out it was a thing. Inspired by my friend Jeff, who is a master at creating playlists, I started a Spotify playlist for Blue Moon, the working title of the novel-in-progress. The animating principle: find songs that embody a scene, a moment, a mood, or a theme, following the plot outline. That means over ten hours of curated music, which might only make sense to me.

As I write, I’m organizing the novel draft into parts, chapters, and scenes. The titles of the thirty-eight chapters are very often titles of songs in the list. What surprised me was that I also gave titles to individual scenes (which won’t appear in the final manuscript). Some chapters only have one scene, some have more. In all, there are seventy-seven scenes. Giving them titles (most from the playlist) makes it easier to see the organization in my head and in the Scrivener outline — an unexpected bonus for me.