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I am a musically-inclined person (4 instruments + voice, ~20yrs experience) and what you want is going to vary a lot based on what exactly kind of musical inclination they have.

When you're talking about a character just randomly bursting into song -- are you talking from a musical/opera, where that's a part of the genre and not entirely acknowledged in-universe? Or are you talking about a situation where other characters go, "Yeah, there goes Jane, singing to herself again"? Because that makes a huge difference on how you're going to treat this.

As far as composing goes -- there's a huge difference between a musician and a composer. They overlap, heck yeah, but there's also a pretty significant portion of musicians who don't write their own stuff, and that's okay. Composing and performing are very different skills -- how many actors are also screenwriters?

So. For the characters you're looking at, are they canonically composers? If not, then just stick with them bursting into songs that people already know and that they love. If I'm just absentmindedly humming something or singing to entertain myself while I'm doing chores, I'm not trying to make up a new melody and all-new words; I'm just going to pick whatever I've been working on lately or listening to and sing that.

What I strongly advise against is picking a piece of real-world existing music and claiming your character wrote it. Again, comparison with movies -- if your character is an actor, are you going to claim they were in an actual IRL movie just to give them a CV?

idk, i feel like that comparison doesn't really work. i'd side-eye someone who had their character say they starred in star wars or something, but i wouldn't even blink if they had a character from modern or future earth say they were in a movie adaptation of an existing book/play/musical or a remake of another movie.

likewise, i'd definitely question a character claiming to have written nickelback songs or whatever, but some obscure garage band on youtube is a different story. it's not like the player is claiming to have written the music themselves and sometimes just saying "she broke out into her number one hit about sunshine and lollipops" is kind of boring.

An adaptation or remake I would say would be more comparable to doing a cover of a song, rather than writing it.

There are ways to write about singing and make it interesting without slavishly noting down lyrics or just commenting about the topic of the song and moving on. Describe the mood of the song, describe the singer's tone, how are they singing it -- are they really belting it out or are they just absently murmuring it? Describe what the song is saying about its topic, or how it might make the listener feel (without godmodding, of course). This all lets you a) tailor the song you're describing to the situation, b) avoid actually picking music that might make a really different statement than you're intending, c) end up a lot more evocative than just words on the screen.

"She sang a bright, cheerful, bubbling song, full of rainbows and sunshine, and a careful listener would probably spot some puppies and kittens in there too. The sound bubbled through the room, making it seem a little brighter and sweeter than it had been a moment before. Of course, some people don't care for candy in their atmosphere."

That gets you a lot more mileage than copy/pasting the lyrics to a Mika song.

Oh beautiful, for spacious posts

Re: Musically-Inclined Characters (When you don't even know music theory)

Re: Musically-Inclined Characters (When you don't even know music theory)

Re: Musically-Inclined Characters (When you don't even know music theory)