Use Your Deficiencies to Strengthen Your Writing

Each of us has the potential to write more potently in the style that is ours. This potential is the space where our musical preferences meet our skill. It’s where the chords and rhythms we gravitate towards meet our particular vocal expression and melodic tendencies. It’s where the words we say and the words we don’t seep from our inspiration and instinct. In this space, songs seem as if they are direct expressions of our personhood. Their writing appears effortless, as if the product of a constellation of predestined events.

This is not how our own songwriting feels to most of us. Our songs come out lopsided, overcomplicated, diluted, and all too often, unfinished. We mess around with chord progressions, criticizing their humps and valleys until they lose their meaning. We bum around half-baked melodies, hoping to buy into our vocal tone or narrow range, and work to overlook the production or instrumental expression that merely stands-in for the real thing. In a sense, we settle. Our songs become after-the-divorce rusted-out junkers transporting us to work and back. 

I believe that as long as we write from a mindset of deficiency, will never discover our unique and potent sound. When we embrace the limitations, however, seeing them as guardrails or even eccentricities, we use them to define the edges of our sound. Let me explain.

Let’s say Kelly has been writing for many years, picks up the guitar on and off, and is somewhat shy about her vocal abilities. Naturally, she often starts with lyrics, because though she feels she’s competent with melody and simple chords, her guitar and vocal skills aren’t where she’d like them to be. In her experience, her audience overlooks her basic skills if the lyric tells a good story, so she begins to view herself as a lyricist who sometimes writes a little music. There’s nothing particularly special about her voice, she believes, so as time goes on, she leans even harder towards lyrically dense songs. Kelly finds her home in Americana and Folk music, but sometimes wonders if she’s a country artist with the interest she has in writing story lyrics.

Now consider Sam. Sam first picked up electric guitar in middle school and taught himself with Ozzie and Stones. Over the years he played in bands, started singing lead, and wrote most of the songs he taught to the band. Sam doesn’t think of himself as much of a lyricist, as ideas often come to him through chords and riffs. He likes tones and textures, and feels like his songs are never really finished. He knows he has good musical ideas in the shape of sections he can’t label, but he has trouble determining where all the pieces should go. Most of his songs lack transitions and fizzle when he runs out of inspiration. Sam considers himself a guitar player who only writes words to have something to sing over his guitar parts.

If Kelly and Sam keep writing with a focus on minimizing their perceived shortcomings, they’ll continue to write songs that result from their shortcomings. But the key to discovering our sound lies in writing songs because of our deficiencies, not despite them.

I’m not suggesting that you determine to sing opera if you have no skill or training. What I’m suggesting is that our deficiencies automatically limit how we approach writing, and by bringing these weaker areas into focus, we can understand how they interact with all our options.

Let’s say Sam has quite a soft-spoken voice, not at all what I associate with lead-vocal in a rock band. Sam could and should experiment with the collision between those two elements that don’t normally go together. His voice could lend a sincerity or even a polish that may expose a new character, or nuance, that we haven’t yet heard in a rock artist like him. Or, let’s say Sam’s vocal is grainy, edgy and somewhat untrained. Sam could play this trait up, and let it carry his imperfect lyrics towards a character who is impulsive or flippant, while also likable and personable with this attitude.

Kelly only assumes she’s a lyricist because it’s the element she chooses to control. Instead, Kelly could intentionally limit her guitar playing to merely one or two chords in an entire song, putting the spotlight on her expression of melody and strong song form including melodic and lyric hooks rather than letting her typical 1 -4 - 5- 1 try to support too much weight. Or, she could try writing an extremely bare lyric, so that her melody and sense of harmonic rhythm has the chance to step up and shine. With so much control over lyrics, she can now use that strength to wrap around the other elements of song, even choosing subject matter that collides with the natural tone of her vocal. A mousy, thin vocal delivering cuttingly honest lyrics might be extremely provocative.

Nobody knows exactly who they are. This leaves us completely open to receive information from our songwriting regarding the unique and expansive possibility of who we ‘might’ be. We discover who we might become by playing with our options. Don’t hide parts of yourself you assume aren’t valuable to show. Like a kaleidoscope, find ways to showcase all of what you bring, using it to define your unique sound.

Stay creative,