Your Novel's Soundtrack

Soundtracks. We know about them. All movies and TV shows have. Yours truly owns a stupid amount of them. I have playlists for the gym, editing, and for various projects. I'm sure you have these as well.

As I was getting ready for NaNoWriMo this year, I worked on coming up with a soundtrack for SFLN. Which is harder than you would think when you're doing it consciously. How do you manage to go beyond your "go-to" music to get the feel right for your story?

It's a good question. Below I've listed a few tips that will help you go past the norm and beef up that soundtrack.

Broaden your musical horizons. This should go without saying. If you listen to music beyond what's in your iPod, you might hear something that will blow your mind. Last.fm is a good place to start as you can listen to music based off of genre, similar artist, or other Last.fm users.
Go by song title. Sounds lame, but sometimes a song title will give you some insight about what the song is about, which will make it easy for you to determine if it will work for your WIP without necessarily listening to it.
Make sure there's music representative of each character and emotion. This sort of goes with number 1, but it does bear repeating: diversity is key. If you have kissing scenes, hardcore techno isn't going to work, just like Kenny G isn't going to work if you're writing about war.

Lurkdom, tell me your tips for creating a soundtrack.

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Last.fm hit of the day: Spooky by Daniel Ash