Strong Foundations: Developing Your Process
I once heard Taylor Swift refer to inspiration as a “purple, sparkly cloud.” It’s common to assume songs magically descend on our favorite artists and writers without all the hair-pulling and self-doubt. It’s as if they’ve found the secret passage to Teletubby-land, and though the door isn’t always wide open, knock hard enough and soon they’re frolicking among the gentle slopes and primary colors of their next glorified release.
Maybe process seems to take the magic out of our favorite songs, and we fans prefer the idea that talent over skill drives the music and messages that speak to us at a soul-level. But instead of skill replacing inspiration-driven writing, I propose that it amplifies it, making a path for inspiration to regularly and passionately flow.
The more we write, the more often we come face to face with our own process, or lack thereof. At some point along the way, we notice the rock we’ve passed for the third time, or the dirt path we found and lost and found again. We recognize the pattern in our writing, the chord progressions we always use, the rhymes we gravitate towards, the rhythms we tend to sing, and the typical messages that sound like they could be songs. And often, this is where we think our skill as songwriters stops. But this is exactly where writers like Taylor, Tedder, and Tweedy begin. And if you’re up for the challenge, you can insert your own name in that list - even if it doesn’t begin with “T”.
Many artists can’t explain where their songs come from, but that doesn’t mean they don’t use a process for writing them. Processes are developed over time through practice, and lots of it. Playing along with songs we love, collaborating with others more skilled, and writing through songs that don’t finish easily are ways we naturally grow process. Since these are the activities of our typical artist, we may take the education in these activities for granted. Eventually, we come to use our own process that results in our more remarkable songs, and that, in turn, teaches us how that process works.
But how do we develop our own process if we don’t know what it is yet? We start at the beginning, and build a strong foundation on tools that writers have tested for centuries. The first tool is brainstorming.
Whether we’re writing lyrics or music or both together, brainstorming is an unencumbered, free-flow of ideas without all the judgment. We allow ideas to come, restraining the urge to stamp a value on them. The ideas that descend while we’re driving, falling asleep, or daydreaming fall into this bottom-level action. But what the experienced writer knows is that we don’t have to wait for these moments to come to us. We can chase them, opening a door every day to our own, disorienting Teletubby land.
The practice is simple, and requires very little of our time. But what it does require is a leap of faith, and a consistency that everyday life will coil around like a 15-foot king cobra. Like the old adage, judge not your songwriting skill by how many unremarkable ideas you have, but by how many times you press on amidst unremarkable ideas…or something like that. Write what is ordinary or miss a day, and start again the next. It’s just that simple.
So what exactly do we do while we’re brainstorming? After all, many of us already brainstorm, and it’s that precise action that gets us into the trouble we’re in with thousands of pieces of songs and no finished ones to show for it. We break the project of writing a song down into smaller parts. With regard to lyrics, we spend 10 minutes a day writing words, journaling or recording ourselves talking about a song idea we have. We describe a moment in time, a scene we think might make a good verse. We summarize the concept of a song in a paragraph, letting flow the language we use when we’re not trying to be clever, poetic, or song-worthy. When it comes to music, we sing with that record button depressed, completely unconcerned with the quality of the voice, over a click-track or chord progression hawked from another song, which was incidentally hawked from a few hundred or thousand other songs before it. We strum some chords for the pure enjoyment of the sound they create, again pressing record to capture a groove or progression that somehow ‘fell out’ while we were noodling. And we resist, with all the dumbfounded glory we can muster, the urge to assess the value in what we’re recording. We rinse, wash and repeat melodies, chord progressions, grooves, words and phrases that sound lifted off the thrift-store shelf, and boldly wear them to the ball. Brainstorming is the concrete that gives our process stability among shifting sands.
Schedule time for yourself most days of the week to brainstorm song ideas. Start each writing session by opening the door to new ideas, musically and lyrically, even if you’re fired up to develop a song already in the works. Soon, you’ll find yourself downstream of a creative current that occasionally delivers gifts of pure gold. Your only job is to be there and retrieve them as they float by.
It’s important to note that brainstorming doesn’t mingle well with editing. Separating the brainstorming and editing phases of writing allows us to release the need to filter while the doorway is open. We can rest assured that what flows through the idea freeway is all we need to finish a song. And in fact, refraining from editing too early in the process actually encourages our most authentic and significant ideas to come. We are teaching ourselves not to fear the process of writing, maintaining that what we need will come to us. There is no scarcity in Teletubby-land. Only abundance. Our only hindrance is the resistance we invite into the process from within, generated from what we hope will be or fear will not. Therefore, brainstorming is a present-moment activity. Valuing the quality of our ideas rips us from the present, and plants us in an alien future. We’ll have plenty of time later in our process to make sense of the future, after our fires have been lit and our coffers been filled.
Take time this week and in the months ahead to schedule regular, 10-minute brainstorming sessions. Take the leap of faith into that purple, sparkly cloud where your own Taylor-songs live. After all the songs you’ll write and finish in the months and years ahead, I promise it will be time you’ll never ask for back.
In my next article, I’ll build on the process and move into how we can sift through our brainstorming for its useful song material.
Stay creative,
Andrea Stolpe
