The Two-Step of Daily Writing
I should do yoga. I know the health benefits, I feel great after a session, and can usually spare 20 minutes most days of the week. Only for the past few years have I committed to a daily practice, though I’ve ‘known’ about the benefits for decades. I’m finally at a point in life where it’s clear I’m never going to “feel like it.” Some things just need doing. Daily writing is one of those things.
Experienced creatives teach high output, creating lots of material from which to sift our better ideas. Ira Glass notes that “the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work,” and Ed Sheeran describes turning on the tap and letting the dirty water eventually run clear, while Rick Rubin says “Art doesn’t get made on the clock, but it can get finished on the clock.” Each time we connect to a source of ideas, we practice habitual writing as a prelude to inspiration rather than a response to it. We also create more opportunities to engage our good taste, refining it even further. We train ourselves to see abundance rather than scarcity, snowballing the likelihood we’ll meet our ideas with honesty and decisiveness.
There seems to be no problem recognizing the value of regular and habitual writing. What trips us up is determining what to do during our daily writing time that will lead to more organization, and finished songs, rather than less. Anyone with hundreds of voice notes, music clips, and lyric bits strewn across their digital and physical landscapes knows that more is not always better. Sometimes more is just a field of weeds.
What we need is a creative process. Collaboration with others naturally creates process, as the value of our efforts can be measured by whether we satisfied the project needs (sound, style, demo), developed or deepened a relationship, learned about or broadened our style through exposure to other writers, or opened up performance and networking opportunities. When we’re working alone, these goals become hazy and the process breaks down.
All creative process begins with an idea. Writers entering songwriting through lyrics practice a form of idea generation called ‘Sensory Writing,’ (also called Object Writing, descriptive writing, Destination Writing, Morning Pages, or journaling). 5-10 minutes of this stream-of-consciousness writing done on a daily basis can unleash loads of ideas without the pressure of writing a full song. For those who enter through musical means, playing around on our instrument with a riff, groove/feel, melodic motif, or chord progression is the parallel of word-writing. Its aim is to loosen up and respond instinctually to what sounds good, getting it down on tape for later organization into a song.
After freely generating material, we move into organization mode. Many creatives suffer from too many options, afraid to lean down and simplify. Like decorating a room with all the items from a packed garage, we’re left trying to make sense of every stand-alone object, whether or not it will be a useful piece of the whole. Instead, we’re better off choosing just a few elemental musical or lyrical pieces, and placing them as anchor points in the song. Building around these pieces using repetition and then elaboration on the theme creates consistency and potency. We’re much more likely to finish a song if we recognize clearly what it’s aiming to be.
Across many art forms, process is made up of generation followed by organization. First we collect ideas, then we organize them into a form that accurately and effectively expresses our intent. We can flip back and forth between these two parts several times during the writing of a song, but trying to collect and organize at the same time often leads to bottlenecks in our process.
Take stock of your songwriting process. Allow yourself the space to simply generate ideas without the need to organize them into song. Get used to writing when you’re not inspired. Spend time at the end of every week choosing the few musical or lyrical ideas generated that still speak to you. Approach the writing process in two stages, and avoid trying to organize while you generate, or generate while you organize. Writing, like yoga, becomes less and less challenging the more you do it. And if you’re like me, once you start, you’ll discover the best reasons for continuing.
Stay creative,
