Paul Nordquist's Unruly Beast of a Songblog

Tip #2: Hold on loosely

2012-02-02T16:46:00.001-05:00

The second in our series of 14-1/2 tips for writing quickly.

Don't get yourself fully committed to any one idea you're working on. If you're stuck on an idea, and the idea starts to sink, then you'll sink with it. Sometimes the song you're working on just isn't ready to move forward. If it doesn't want to move, it won't help to poke it and push it!

It's better to stay light on your feet and willing to jump to another idea. You can come back to this first idea some other day.

Similarly, in the middle of a song, don't get stuck on any one approach. If the music isn't working out, start over with a different tempo or a different rhythmic structure. If you can't find a word that rhymes, rephrase the previous line so it's easier to rhyme with.

Writing a song is like solving a puzzle, and until the puzzle is solved, all of the pieces have to be free to move.

Quick writing tip #1: Start with the easy one

2012-02-01T17:56:00.001-05:00

If you have a list of ideas, go for the easiest one first. Don't worry if it seems too easy, or if it's based on a cheap joke, or if people might mock it for being too simple. It's just your first song, after all. It's the warmup lap. You're going to write plenty more.

In the middle of working on a song, if you're trying to get one piece of the song together, go with the quickest and easiest solution. If this spot turns out to be the weak link in the song, you can try a different approach later. But often in songwriting the simplest answer turns out to be the best one.

14-1/2 tips on writing fast and not getting bogged down

2012-01-31T17:33:00.004-05:00

For those of you participating in this year's February Album Writing Month Challenge, watch this blog for a series of tips on how to write quickly and avoid getting bogged down in indecision.

And if you're not a FAWM participant, these tips might still be helpful. Writing fast is the way to come up with your best and freshest material. If you have to throw quality out the window during your quick-writing sessions, you can pull it back in later, and spend as much time as you need on revising and refining your songs. Even if you take an extravagant amount of time in the cleanup phase, you still save time overall by using the quick-and-dirty approach to writing your first draft.

Tip #1 arrives on February 1!

While you're waiting, here are Robin Frederick's helpful tips on writer's block.

Seven ways to start verse 1

2012-01-23T17:28:00.003-05:00

Do you sometimes get stuck trying to write the first line of lyrics for verse 1? You want to make a good first impression, so these few words carry extra weight. But don't let the pressure weigh you down while you're writing! Just try something and see how it works out.

Here are a few suggestions to help you get your pen moving:

1. Start with the title. Go straight to the main idea (and hook) of the song. Maybe you don't even need a chorus.
London calling to the faraway towns...
Let's dance. Put on your red shoes and dance the blues...

2. Describe a scene. Use descriptive imagery that sets up the song's emotional tone.
If you see a faded sign by the side of the road...
Steve walks warily down the street, his brim pulled way down low...

3. Introduce a person, place, or thing.
Just a small-town girl living in a lonely world...
There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold...

4. Issue an admonition, a command, a plea, a threat, or an accusation. The focus shifts to the character your narrator is talking to.
Hey Jude, don't make it bad...
Don't pull your love out on me, baby...

5. Ask a question. The listener immediately wonders about how you might answer the question.
If there's something strange in your neighborhood, who ya gonna call?
Did we fly to the moon too soon?

6. Make a startling suggestion or an outrageous claim. It grabs the listener's attention; they think, "Wait a minute, that can't be right." They'll tune in to see where you're going with this.
Imagine there's no heaven...
In your mind you have abilities you know/ To telepath messages through the vast unknown...

7. Start out with a paradox or contradiction, or two elements that don't seem to go together. The listener will follow along to see whether you can make sense out of the contradiction.
I am he as you are he as you are me...
Oranges on apple trees/ Birds that mate with bumblebees...

Need some more ideas and examples? Pick a favorite album, and take a look at its lyric sheet. How did they start verse 1? And did that first line help draw you into the song?

How to frame your new songs before you write them

2012-01-18T18:13:00.006-05:00

My last several posts have described what you can do in general to get ready to write a lot of songs in a short time. But you can also start working on individual songs, without actually starting to write them. I call this work framing a song, because it's kind of like putting together a picture frame before you start painting a picture.

Framing means getting a clear idea of what you want a song to accomplish. Creating the frame, in a way, is like formulating a question, and the song itself, when you finally write it, is the answer to the question.

Framing can take many different forms. You might have a song title in mind. You might have an experience or emotion that you want to convey in the form of a song. You might have a technical musical goal, such as writing in a musical style that you've never worked in before. You might gather a few pictures and create a little collage that conveys a mood that you want to translate into a song. Or you might have a specific song that you like, or a group of songs, that you want to try to imitate without copying directly.

Ideally, framing means gathering together your best inspiration, love, and enthusiasm into an organized space where you can use its energy to help forge your newest creation.

If you've decided to pursue the FAWM 2012 goal of writing 15 songs, here's an example of how you could start framing your songs now so you'll be ready to start writing on February 1.

Count out 15 sheets of blank paper. (If you use them up, you can add more sheets later.)
On each sheet of paper, try to write down at least one idea or goal that could serve as the starting point of a new song.
Look through the sheets of paper a few times over the next several days, and see if you can add ideas, words, images, or musical strategies to flesh out each song frame. (To stick with the rules of FAWM, don't start writing actual lyrics or music until 2/1.)

I know that some people find it hard to start with blank paper. If it's easier, you can start with these three forms. These are PDFs that you can download, print, and fill in:

Of course, these PDF forms cover just three out of many possible approaches to framing your songs. You might find that you can invent your own forms that are better suited to your own musical goals.

If you've fully framed a song before you start to write it, the music and lyrics often fall into place very quickly. In practice, the framing — getting clear on what you want to write — usually take more time than the writing itself. That's true whether you do it formally on paper or whether you just muddle through it while you're trying to write the song.

February 1 is just a few weeks away, so it's not likely that you'll get 15 songs fully framed by then. It's okay if you don't — the point of this exercise is just to give you a head start.

Get ready for FAWM: Do a dry run

2012-01-16T18:05:00.003-05:00

Suppose you've gotten all of your tools together and prepared your space for the FAWM songwriting challenge. How do you know if you're really ready for February 1? You do a dry run.

A dry run means that you send the plane up in the air and drop an empty bombshell on a sample target. You run through all the scene changes and lighting cues, start to finish, in an empty theater. In songwriting, a dry run means that you go through all the motions of songwriting and create a little sample song.

Your sample song doesn't have to be any good, and it can be very short. For example, you could write one 8-bar verse and a 4-bar chorus, just a little fragment of a song. The point isn't the song itself, it's proving that you can go through all of the steps of picking an idea, writing lyrics, writing a melody, writing chords, and, if recording is part of your process, recording the completed song.

(This song can't count towards your FAWM total, so don't use one of your best ideas. Use a throwaway idea.)

Along the way, everything works. You don't freeze up when you have to pick a rhyme. Your musical instrument works, there's ink in the pen, the recording software capture audio correctly. If something needs a little troubleshooting, it's better that you're doing it now, when the official clock isn't ticking.

Get ready for FAWM: Get your stuff together

2012-01-13T17:09:00.001-05:00

If you're planning to sign up for February Album Writing Month (http://fawm.org), or if you have some other reason to write a whole pile of songs, you can prepare by getting your stuff together. This might include finding tools, preparing equipment, clearing a workspace, and gathering other resources.

Different songwriters' work habits vary, so there is no single checklist of songwriting tools. Use these question to help you think of what you might need to get ready:

Will you write down lyrics with a pen or pencil, or on a computer? Do you have a good pen at hand? Where is the pencil sharpener? Do you need to clear some table space for your laptop?
Will you record yourself as part of the writing process? If you'll use recording software, does it need to be updated? Do you need to pick a microphone, set up a mic stand, or find a mic cable? If you'll use a handheld recorder, where will you place it while you're recording? Do you have a spare battery? Do you have headphones handy?
Will you use music paper to write down your melody? Do you need a clipboard?
Where are your notebooks of song ideas? What fragments of lyrics do you have sitting around?
Will you use a rhyming dictionary?
Have you signed up for FAWM? Have you bookmarked the fawm.org website? Have you bookmarked this blog? What other websites might be handy to have at hand during your songwriting process?
What musical instruments will you use for songwriting and for recording demos? Are your instruments all set up and ready to go?

Get ready for FAWM: Picture yourself writing a song

2012-01-11T16:51:00.003-05:00

Suppose you sign up for February Album Writing Month 2012 (http://fawm.org). The rules say that you can't start writing your songs until February 1. Does that mean you're stuck twiddling your thumbs until then? Not at all! There's a lot you do to get ready. Without writing a single line of lyrics or a note of melody, you can get yourself super-prepared to write a pile of songs.

What happens if you don't do any preparation ahead of time? In most cases you end up doing the preparation anyway, while the clock ticks through the hours that you thought you would spend writing.

Some FAWMers will spend the evening of February 1, in their first songwriting session, getting the guitar tuned, finding a cord that works, clearing piles of papers off the desk, looking for their old notebook of song ideas, updating their recording software, and finally thinking about what they want to write their first song about. But none of those chores involve any actual writing, so you could just as well do them on January 31... or on January 11, for that matter.

Start tonight with this short mental exercise. Close your eyes and imagine your first songwriting session. Imagine it in vivid detail. The session is extremely productive, and you write a brilliant song, of course, but that's not the point of this exercise.

Think through the tiny practical details of your songwriting session. What room are you in? What distractions do you face? What do you do first? Where do you sit? What pen do you use? Which guitar pick? How do you decide what to write about? Spend at least a full minute letting your imagination run through things with this level of detail.

Odds are that you'll see at least six different ways that you're not fully ready for your first songwriting session. You have tools to prepare, stuff to clear out of the way, and some thinking to do about what you might write your song about.

Get ready for FAWM: Set your expectations aside

2012-01-09T16:45:00.003-05:00

This advice is geared towards people planning to participate in FAWM 2012 (http://fawm.org), but the same principles apply to any creative effort.

Perhaps the biggest thing that would keep people from writing 15 songs in a month is that they're trying to do too good a job. In general, probably the #1 thing that keeps would-be artists paralyzed is the misguided worry about whether their work is "good enough."

It's perfectly understandable that you want to create something good (or even great). But there's a problem: your mind can't be in creating-something-new mode and in worrying-about-quality mode at the same time. At any given moment, you have to choose one or the other.

Many songwriters find that writing song is a slow, tortured process. For them, it takes a long time to write a song! But in fact they're spending only about 10% of that time in productive writing. The other 90% of their time is lost to worrying. This means that you can write up to ten times faster if you're willing to temporarily forget about whether your songs are good or not. You can write up to ten times as many songs in the same length of time.

So plan on writing 15 quick songs in February, and just know that some of them will be better and some will be worse. And that's fine. Your job isn't to make them come out good. Your job, if you choose to do it, is to write 15 songs by February 29.

Trust your creative process. It will always create the best results that it can, without any need for you to micromanage things.

Get ready for FAWM 2012

2012-01-08T17:40:00.003-05:00

February Album Writing Month (http://fawm.org) is coming in a few weeks. This year's challenge is to write a 14-1/2 song "album" in only 29 days.

(What's a half of a song? To avoid splitting hairs, I'm rounding up the goal to 15 songs.)

For songwriters who can spare the time, I recommend participating in FAWM. It provides a structure and a deadline to force you to produce something. Along the way, you'll blast through the creative barriers that often stop you from writing.

If you think it would be pretty cool to write 15 new songs, but you're not sure you can do it in one month, watch this blog for tips and suggestions. I hope to help you get off to a quick start, avoid the common creative pitfalls, and get songs finished faster than ever before.

And if you're gearing up to write and record a real album instead of a FAWM "album," the same advice applies -- you just have more at stake in the results. Stay tuned!

Does your song pass the a capella test?

2011-10-28T18:16:00.000-04:00

Try singing your melody line all by itself, with no drum track, no chord instruments, no instruments at all. How well does your melody hold up a capella?

A capella (pronounced AH kuh-PELL-uh) is a musical term, originally from Italian, that means "sung without accompaniment" or "no instruments, just voices."

Not every rock melody can hold together without accompaniment. The notes might not make sense without the chord line. Rhythmic syncopations might just sound wrong if there's no steady beat for them to play against. And in some songs, the instrumental lines have all the interesting parts, and the vocal lines are little more than punctuation.

I mention all of these caveats to emphasize that it can still be a good song if it fails the a capella test. It doesn't mean you have to rewrite the song from scratch. But if all of your songs fail this test, then you are missing out on the strengths that melody writing can bring to your music.

A song that works a capella is usually one that people can sing along with easily. It's a song that's easy to remember. It sticks in people's heads. It's the kind of song that people sing to themselves while they're out walking and sing with their friends while drinking. Every album should have at a few of these.

How do you write a melody that works a capella? The most direct way is simply to write the vocal line first, and sing it out loud while you're writing it. After the melody is finished and solid, then come up with chords and the rest of the instrumental arrangement. You'll find that the rest of the writing is easy when the melody is strong enough to stand on its own.

Melody tip: Vary the length of phrases

2011-10-26T18:42:00.003-04:00

A melodic phrase is a single line of melody. Originally a phrase was sung in a single breath by the singer, with a rest between phrases for the singer to take the next breath. Some modern-day songs use longer phrases that require more than one breath, but it helps to remember that phrasing is at least symbolically linked to breathing. A phrase is a breath of music.

One of the most effective ways to give shape and pacing to the song as a whole is to vary the length of melodic phrases. For example, you might have 4-bar phrases in the verse and 2-bar phrases in the chorus. The different phrase length gives the chorus an unmistakably different feel from the verse.

Another common formula is to use shortened phrases at the end of the verse, to create a sense of increased momentum heading into the chorus.

Many ordinary songs use 4- and 8-bar phrases all the way through. It's unfortunately so commonplace that using any other phrase length anywhere in your song will help you stand out as interesting and different. Look to the Beatles catalog for some great examples of a flexible approach to phrase length.

Melody tip: Ignore the chords

2011-10-24T18:21:00.001-04:00

A pentatonic melody is one that uses the five-note pentatonic scale. In major, the pentatonic scale includes scale notes 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6. In C major, those notes are C, D, E, G, A. Notice that there's no F or B in a C pentatonic melody.

Pentatonic minor includes notes 1, 3, 4, 5, and 7. In A minor, those notes are A, C, D, E, G. Aren't those the same notes as C major pentatonic? Indeed they are; the difference lies in whether C or A serves as the tonic (the keynote).

One interesting thing about the pentatonic scale is that it doesn't include any half-step intervals. Half-step intervals are central to musical expressions of personal emotion. Without them, pentatonic melodies have a somewhat detached, universal feel. They're great for a big crowd of people singing together.

And the second interesting thing about the pentatonic scale is that, with one narrow exception, you can use whatever chords you want and it doesn't sound wrong. You can use any of your key's six major and minor chords in combination with any series of notes from the pentatonic scale.

The one exception is that the melody can't sit on the 1 note while playing a [three]m or [five] chord. In C major, you can't stay on the C note in the melody while playing an Em or G chord. The C clashes uncomfortably with the B in those chords. But as long as your melody keeps moving around, you won't run into that problem.

Morrissey, lead singer of The Smiths, and many others in the post-new wave/modern rock world use this trick to craft melodies that show an utter disregard for the accompanying chord line. Perhaps it expresses a personal stubbornness, a defiance of authority and convention. But you can't argue with the musical results, which are often quite powerful.

Give this a try: write a pentatonic melody, and then use some random technique for picking chords from the key's six chords. Then try a different random set of chords. You'll see that the melody fits in with both different chord lines.

Melody tip: Work against the chords

2011-10-21T18:56:00.001-04:00

As I noted in the previous post, the simple way to make your melody sound right is to emphasize notes that belong to the current chord.

The sophisticated way to make your melody sound interesting is to do the opposite: to emphasize notes that don't belong to the current chord. If you do this carelessly, you run the risk that the melody will just sound wrong. But there is a simple secret to doing things wrong and getting an artful result: craft the "wrong" element into a consistent, discernible pattern. Then it sounds like a deliberate choice instead of a mistake.

As you listen to other people's songs, and as you sing and play them, pay attention to which melody notes fit into the chords and which notes cut against the chords. Skilled songwriters use both kinds.

Melody tip: Work with the chords

2011-10-19T18:20:00.002-04:00

For an absolute beginner in melody writing, here's the #1 insider's secret on how to write melodies that sound musical: Pick a melody note that's in the chord sounding at the same time. Most chords have three notes, so that gives you three melody notes to choose from. Try one of those notes, and see how it works.

When the chord changes, see if your melody note fits the new chord. If not, find a nearby note that does. You never have to move by more than one step to fit into the new chord.

For a little extra interest, you can add a few notes that don't belong to the current chord. (The fancy technical name for these notes is non-chord tones.)

You can move from one chord note up or down to another chord note, passing through one or two inbetween notes that don't belong to the chord. (The notes inbetween are called passing tones.)
You can start on a chord note, take one step down to the next note, and then back up to the first note. (That lower note, which doesn't belong to the chord, is called a neighbor tone.)
You can also go one step up to the next note, and then come back down. (Also a neighbor tone, the upper neighbor.)
You can start the measure with an accented note that's not in the chord -- a pointedly dissonant note. But you quickly resolve the dissonance by moving down one step to a note that belongs to the chord. (If you want to get really fancy, you can also move up one step to resolve the dissonance.)

To recap, here's the absolute beginner's way to write a melody:

Pick a series of notes that fit with the chord progression.
Here and there, change a few of the notes to non-chord tones, using any combination you like of the four kinds of non-chord tones listed above.

Melody tip: Cast of characters

2011-10-17T19:03:00.004-04:00

One way to approach melody writing is to treat the notes — usually the seven notes of the major or minor scales — as if each were a separate character in a stage play. In this frame of mind, you treat each note's entrance and exit as a significant event.

For example, you might start with a single-note soliloquy, and introduce a few more notes one at a time to join the conversation. Soon one of those notes wanders off to start a new conversation with some other notes.

When a note has worn out its welcome in the spotlight, take that note offstage for a while and let a different character lead the action for a while.

Melody tip: Nudge the rhythm

2011-10-14T18:51:00.000-04:00

If your melody seems basically good but sound just a little too predictable and familiar, try nudging the melody a quarter-note earlier or later with respect to the underlying beat. (In a fast tempo, move up or back by a half note.)

This simple, mechanical change can make it sound like a completely different melody. Sometimes, that's all you have to do to get it into the right groove.

Melody tip: The melody line is a rhythm line

2011-10-12T18:26:00.000-04:00

If you tap out the rhythm of your melody line on the tabletop, does it sound interesting without the help of the words and the pitches? Would anyone have a chance of recognizing your song just from the rhythm of the melody?

It's okay if the answer is no. There are many good, successful rock songs with nothing interesting or distinctive in their melodic rhythm. But if you want your song to be catchy and memorable, to get listeners' attention and to stick in their memories, then take some time to look for ways to make the melody's rhythm more distinctive and interesting — especially in the song's chorus and in the hook line.

When I set out to write music for a finished set of lyrics, I write the rhythm first. I don't start thinking about notes until I've settled on a tempo and feel and sketched out the melodic rhythm.

Often, at this stage of writing, I make some edits to the lyrics so that the words fit neatly into the rhythm scheme. Sometimes I have to rephrase things to add or remove a few syllables. I make sure that each strongly accented note lines up with a strong word, a word that deserved to be emphasized.

I've learned from experience that if I don't get the right rhythm to start with, I'll end up at a dead end and have to start over anyway. And if I do get the rhythm right, the notes fall into place without any great effort.

Melody tip: Geometric melody lines

2011-10-10T17:36:00.003-04:00

The previous post described the natural melody style that imitates the pitch of ordinary speech. The opposite style of melody involves carefully crafted shapes and patterns of notes. I sometimes call this style geometric melody, because on music paper the notes form neat geometric patterns that you can pick out by eye. The patterns are even clearer if you chart the succession of notes on graph paper.

At its best, geometric melody is catchy and engaging. It delights the parts of our brains that solve puzzles and recognize patterns. (Rhyme schemes provide a similar kind of appeal.)

At its worst, geometric melody can seem inane and childish, and it can wear out its welcome after a while. There are a limited set of pleasing patterns that can be formed with the seven scale notes, and all of them have been used before, so you might have to tinker with the notes until you come up with something that sounds fresh and original enough.

Many conventional songs use natural melody for the verses and geometric melody for the catchier choruses.

Take a look at your own songs. If you never use geometric-style melody, you should try your hand it. And if you never use natural, speech-style melody, that is equally worth exploring. If your melodies are always in the vague area between those two styles, then you have double the chance to improve your melodies by practicing both styles.

If your melody style seems too limited, try switching up the method you use to compose your melodies. Stereotypically, natural melody is composed by singing out loud, while geometric melody is composed while sitting at a keyboard.

Melody tip: The natural melody of speech

2011-10-07T16:59:00.000-04:00

Melodies are shapes painted by musical notes. A melody line goes up, then down, then up again, and its particular shape helps make it unique and interesting.

Ordinary, everyday speech has its own shapes. Even without musical notes, the pitch of a person's voice moves up and down in the course of an ordinary sentence. Some of these pitch movements are universal expressions, some are characteristic of a specific language or region, some express specific emotions, and some reveal the speaker's unique personality. Use your songwriter ears to listen to the shifting pitches of everyday speech, and you'll find music everywhere you go.

When you have a new song lyric to set to music, try saying the words out loud in as natural a way as you can. Imagine that you're actually talking to someone, using the words of the song, and it's important that they understand what you're trying to say. Notice the pitch of your voice as you say the words. (If it helps, record yourself speaking, and listen to the playback.)

Often you'll hear three pitches in your speaking voice: a central pitch, a higher pitch for emphasized words, and a lower pitch at the end of a phrase or sentence. Try assigning those pitches to three notes, and see if that works as a melody. Adjust the notes as you need to so that they fit your chords. Sometimes that's all you have to do, and the melody falls into place.

Using the natural melody of speech is easy for you as a songwriter, and it also makes it easy for the listener to grasp the meaning of the words. You can't use this technique all the time — some songs demand something different — but go ahead and use it where you can.

Melody tip: Use higher notes for the chorus

2011-10-06T17:35:00.000-04:00

In the previous post we talked about the song's melodic range. Each part of the song has its own melodic range, as well, and you can use melodic range to help define your song's structure.

There's a very conventional way to do this. The first part of the verse uses a low and narrow melodic range, often with only two or three notes. The "part B" of the verse moves to a slightly higher register. And the chorus introduces even higher notes, often including the highest notes in the song.

Using a higher melodic range for the chorus, and often also a wider melodic range, is one way to help the listener hear that the chorus the high point of the song.

In some songs, the chorus also has longer notes than the verse. The verse has more syllables to squeeze in, so the notes have to be shorter. The chorus, with fewer lyrics, spreads out with sustained notes or melismas. (A melisma is a single syllable stretched out over several melody notes.)

Melody tip: Know your tessituras

2011-10-04T21:33:00.000-04:00

A song's melodic range, as measured by its lowest and highest melody notes, must line up with the singer's range. If it doesn't, you'll transpose the song — move it up or down into a different key — so that it fits the singer's ability.

But it's not always enough to look at the lowest and highest notes of a song. It's also important to the core range of a song, a smaller set of notes that occur most frequently in the song and in the most important parts of the song. Musicians call this range the song's tessitura.

A singer has a tessitura as well. That's the set of notes that the singer can handle most strongly without getting vocally tired. The singer's tessitura is a smaller range of notes than the singer's maximum range. Make sure your song's tessitura matches up with the singer's tessitura.

Some singers, especially those with classical vocal training, know their range and can tell you precisely what their strongest range is. Some other singers just don't know and might even make incorrect guesses if you ask them. The way to be sure of a singer's best range is to listen to songs they've sung before and check what notes they're actually singing.

If you sing your own songs, you probably naturally place them in the best range for your voice. But if you have a low- or middle-range voice, you might have gotten in the habit of singing along with your favorite pop stars in ranges that are uncomfortably high for you, and not actually your best singing range. Don't compete with other singers who aren't even on the stage; transpose your songs down a step or two if that's better for your voice.

Some songwriters bristle at changing the melody to accommodate a singer, and some bands balk at re-learning a song in a different key, but it's a good practice to make those changes as a matter of course. Remember: If you want people to like your song, a good vocal performance has a bigger impact than any other single factor. Or, to put it more bluntly, from the audience's point of view: If it's not sung well, it isn't a good song.

Melody tip: Share the spotlight

2011-10-02T15:47:00.003-04:00

Typically the important melody line is the main vocal line, but not always. There are many delightful examples where the main vocal melody has very little movement, and an instrumental line (or sometimes a backing vocal line) steps in with an interesting background melody that moves that song forward.

This comes naturally with rap vocals, because rap is inherently an unpitched style of vocals. But you'll find it also in funk and blues-based rock, where the vocal line might stick to two or three notes while a repeating riff holds the melodic spotlight. And you'll come across it in the chorus of many uptempo rock and pop songs, where the main vocal hook is just a staccato exclamation, and it's the instrumental parts that make the chorus catchy.

October is Melody Month

2011-10-01T22:54:00.003-04:00

Of all the elements of music, melody is the one that most people grasp intuitively, without any training needed.

To get from that intuitive knowing to a deeper level of knowledge, many hours of training are required, starting with learning music notation. But all of that training still isn't enough. You must integrate the book-learning with your original intuitive sense of melody before you can say that you've mastered it.

This month, we won't go into that level of depth and detail. But this blog will feature some quick tips about melody writing, simple ideas that might give you a few more options to work with as you craft the melody of your next song.

What's stopping me?

2011-05-10T17:43:00.005-04:00

If you're a creative artist, but you spend too much of your time not creating anything and feeling stuck, take heart! You're not alone. Most creative artists are stuck most of the time — which is a sorry state of things!

It's not that we're weak-willed; will power has nothing to do with it. It's not that we lack discipline — though discipline might help out in the long run. And in most cases it's not that we're not trying hard enough. Many of us run ourselves into the ground with an excess of hit-or-miss effort.

Our fault, if anything, is in neglecting ourselves. We artists are subtle and complex instruments that require careful tuning and alignment for best results. We need to learn to play our creative selves with the same skill and attention that we play our musical instruments, to wield ourselves with the same finesse that we bring to a pen or paintbrush.

Back in February, I signed up for the February Album Writing Month challenge — to write 14 new songs in 28 days. Writing that much material that quickly is indeed a challenge, but, as I pointed out at the time, it's an opportunity to purge your creative process of the difficulties that slow you down. You can set realistic standards based on the limitations of the game, and find new ways to collect creative ideas and make quick decisions.

In the FAWM challenge, I would never ding a songwriter who made a real effort but ended up short of the target of 14 songs. But I was stunned by the actual results: more than 3 out of 4 songwriters who signed up never even wrote their first song. This made me speculate that Just Getting Started is a bigger hurdle than I'd given it credit for. I mused that it's a huge but invisible problem: No one ever finds out about The Things You Didn't Do, no matter how great they might have been.

What would the world be like if we could change the game a bit, so that even a fraction of these lost inspirations instead came to fruition? It would certainly be a much richer place.

This issue of getting started had special resonance for me, because I've often had great difficulties getting started on creative projects. I've learned over the years that it's important to start from where you actually are, no matter how badly you wish your starting point were a little bit closer to your goal. I've learned that if a project is too big to start today, you should pass on it, no matter how cool the idea is, because it's just too big for you. And it's easy to underestimate the importance of simply being comfortable in your creative space.

As I thought further about the difficulties of getting started, I realized that creative artists have a unique challenge: our work requires the ability to enter the creative state of consciousness, a special brain configuration that is not always available when we need it and not under our willful control. Without the creative state, we can't do good work. We face what's called "writer's block" or "being stuck."

The creative state can only emerge under certain conditions. First of all, you must be fully in charge, fully responsible for the creative work to be done. In addition, you must believe you can be successful in solving your creative problem, and also that doing so will make a difference that matters. These two key beliefs — "Yes I Can" and "Yes It Will" — must be in place. If doubts arise and interfere with either of them, you won't be able to enter the creative state.

Luckily, these two key beliefs are only loosely based in reality, which means you have the power to fix your creative block just by changing your thoughts.

On the "Yes I Can" side, you might want to pick a smaller goal, one that's easier to achieve, and give up trying to prove yourself. You also must be careful that your goals don't grow out of control, because your own excitement and enthusiasm can quickly build them up into mountains so high that you can never scale them.

Or you might just need a boost of confidence in your abilities, especially if you've spent too much time in an environment of overly negative and critical people.

On the "Yes It Will" side, you can sidestep your doubts by changing what you focus on. If your focus is on your to-do list, you could easily feel you're getting nowhere. And if you're worried about what people will think, you can never feel sure of success. So focus on things that are already inside your control, and you'll feel more positive about moving ahead.

If you're stuck, don't just say "I procrastinated," because that's an explanation that explains nothing. If you just try again, with more exclamation points this time, you will probably just fail again with more exclamation points. You don't need more will power. You need a different game board. You don't need incredible luck. You need to pick the winning cards and put them in your hand to start with.

Take a closer look at your situation, make a reasonable guess about why you haven't taken action yet, and then try something different. Change your goal, or redefine what it means to be successful at your goal. Change your environment, your thoughts, your timing, your tools, your attitude, or your behavior. You're tuning your instrument for the first time, so don't expect to get it perfect on the first try. But if you keep trying things and paying attention to the results, you can create the right setting where it's easy for you to create beautiful works of art.

It takes time and careful attention to turn going-nowhere into momentum-of-a-freight-train. Don't expect an instant, miraculous solution. But you don't have to do it all at once. Solve today's problems today, and save tomorrow's for tomorrow. One bit at a time, you can build momentum and get your creative life moving. Let's get started!

Don't say "procrastinated"

2011-05-09T21:07:00.003-04:00

Procrastinate is a funny word: it's an action verb for a passive state of non-action. More to the point, saying "I procrastinated" doesn't help you understand and change a pattern of inaction. It's easier to defeat procrastination if you get past the word procrastination and get to a slightly deeper understanding of what happened.

If you want to change over to a pattern of action, take a look at your pattern of inaction with these five questions:

What created the expectation of action? How vague or specific was your plan, commitment, or deadline?
What actually happened? (Stick to the facts. Skip the judgments, excuses, and apologies.)
What's a simple and reasonable explanation for the inaction?
Do you still intend to take action? (Make a conscious, active decision.)
What could you do differently that might lead to different results? There's no point in trying the same thing that didn't work, so think of something you could change.

If you keep it simple, you can run through these five steps in less than a minute. For example:

What created the expectation? I promised myself I would start on this project yesterday.
What actually happened? The day went by, and I didn't do anything.
What's a reasonable explanation? There were several unexpected things in the evening, and I completely forgot about my plans.
Do you still intend to take action? Yes, today I'm going to start on it, even if it's just for five minutes.
What could you do differently? I'll put a reminder on my pillow, so I can't go to sleep without doing something on this project.

Here's another, slightly different, example:

What created the expectation? Every year I say I should do my taxes early, so I won't be up against a deadline if something goes wrong.
What actually happened? The filing deadline is two weeks away, and I haven't started.
What's a reasonable explanation? I hate working with numbers, especially with the pressure of knowing that a mistake could get me into legal trouble.
Do you still intend to take action? Yes, I must! I'll be in even more trouble if I don't do my taxes on time.
What could you do differently? I'll sidestep the math fear for now: I'll just do the initial work of gathering the information I need. Then I'll at least be one step further ahead.

As you work with this process, don't sweat over it. You don't have to come up with the perfect explanation (step 3) or the best way to change things (step 5). Just make a quick guess, try it out, and see what happens. Even if it fails, you have one more example of something that doesn't work. You'll still be one step ahead of where you'd be if your thought process ended with "Oops, I procrastinated again."

You were born successful

2011-05-08T15:22:00.000-04:00

I confess I'm sort of squigged out by the current flood of experts, coaches, and authors who promise that they can help you "be successful." Whenever I see that promise, I have to ask, "successful at what?"

I would hope that people want to succeed at some specific, worthy goal that inspires them. The promise that you can "become" a generically "successful person" rings very empty to me. It sounds like a sales pitch that would come from someone deliberately targeting people with low self-esteem, people who might hope to be rescued by some external, magical form of redemption.

To me, you start out successful — no redemption required. You can't "become successful," you can only become "more successful" by adding to your trophy collection of meaningful accomplishments.

I'm sure there is some real value in the current crop of success books, and I'm sure that "success coaches" are really helping people improve their lives. One thing you won't get for your money is becoming successful. You are already successful.

The to-do list and hopelessness

2011-05-07T17:42:00.001-04:00

In theory, a to-do list pulls together all of your best current opportunities to improve your life and make an impact on the world. This supercharged piece of paper is a physical representation of your personal power and immediate potential!

Does looking at your to-do list make you feel powerful, engaged with life, and ready to jump into action?

No? Not exactly?

In practice, confronting someone with their own to-do list is more likely to drain the life right out of them. You see their face going pale, their gut clenching, their muscles getting weaker. Their mood somewhere on the spectrum from stoic resignation to utter hopelessness.

The to-do list unfortunately has become a locus of discouragement that seems to make life even harder.

For most people, trying to move forward in the face of this kind of discouragement is like trying to walk with an extra fifty pounds on their shoulders. For creative people, it's like trying to walk while chained to the wall. You'll get nowhere.

You can't use your creative mind -- which is your most valuable asset -- while you're in a state of discouragement.

Time management tools don't work very well for most creative people. As far as I can tell, all the standard tools and systems you can buy were invented by non-creative people for use by other non-creative people. If you've sincerely tried to use a time management system and it didn't work for you, don't let that experience make you feel guilty and inept. If you needed a hammer and the closest thing on hand was a screwdriver, that doesn't mean you're bad with nails.

If your to-do list isn't a happy place, then don't try to use it to manage your whole life. Use it in the narrowest way possible: to keep track of your non-routine obligations that have real-world deadlines and real consequences. Hopefully, that's a short list. (If it's not, let's face it, your life is out of balance right now, and your creative life might need to be put on hold while you clean up more urgent messes.)

And here's one more suggestion for you to think about: You're a creative person, so why not create your own time management system? Devise something that actually works for you, your own idiosyncratic system that organizes the information you need and actively helps you feel inspired.

If you've found or invented an effective tool to organize your creative work, please post a comment here and tell us briefly about it, how it works, and how it helps you.

Backwards advice: "Visualize your goals"

2011-05-06T18:36:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I wrote about the Tommy fallacy, the misguided idea that you can copy someone's results by painstakingly mimicking their actions.

Of course, there are some things that you can effectively imitate and copy. You can watch how a chef chops onions, watch how a rhythm guitarist uses his whole body in the rhythm, or watch how a singer's facial expressions enliven the vocal line. By teaching your body the same motions that you observed the experts doing, you can improve your technical skills.

You can also find, on the web, recipes and how-to instructions for a million different problems. That's a very precise and practical way to copy someone else's successful actions.

But a generation of slightly confused success coaches took the copying idea too far and made it the centerpiece of their success advice.

They made detailed studies of some extremely successful people, people who had accomplished extraordinary things. They discovered common behaviors among all of those highly successful people. And thus they reverse-engineered a recipe for success. If you imitate all of these success behaviors, they said, you too can be successful.

Of course, those success books that delivered this recipe weren't really any more helpful than the diet books, one shelf over in the same bookstores, were. Unfortunately, their methodology fell prey to the Tommy fallacy; they assumed incorrectly that you can copy the results by copying the visible behavior.

The trouble with relying on a strictly retrospective methodology is that it can only show correlations between two variables, but it can't actually tell you which variable is the cause and which is the effect. The behaviors they observed and recommended were actually the results (or side effects) of being successful, not the ingredients of success.

For example, successful people are passionate and work long hours to achieve their goals. But this doesn't mean passion and hard work are the cause of success. The truth is the opposite: feeling passionate and working hard are the result of highly effective, successful action. Of course you work hard and feel enthusiastic if you see that your actions are highly successful.

Along the same lines, successful people quite often start out a vivid and compelling mental picture of their goal, almost as if it were already real. This observation was turned into a bit of widely repeated advice: "visualize your goals."

The advice goes like this: First, pick a goal. Then, take the time to develop a clear and powerful mental picture of that goal fully achieved.

Visualizing your goals isn't a bad thing in itself. But there are two things wrong with this line of advice:

For most people, it's not easy to generate vivid, detailed mental pictures on demand. It takes a lot of time and real effort.
Even if you can painstakingly build a mental picture of your goal, this willfully-created image still isn't the same as the visions that led other people to extraordinary success.

The original observation was correct: People who accomplish extraordinary things usually had a vivid picture guiding them. But none of those highly successful people picked a goal and then sat down and spent an hour trying to create a mental image of it. The truth is the opposite. These people had the vivid mental image first, and because they couldn't get it out of their head, they adopted it as their goal. They let their visions guide them.

My read on the profiles of extraordinarily people is that they were not so much driven to be successful per se; rather, they were driven to accomplish specific worthy goals. These people were struck by inspiration, powerful inspiration that arrived with a detailed vision, with a flurry of helpful ideas, and with a big blast of energy to get them started. Each of these people were poked pretty hard by one of those angels who drop in, seemingly at random (from our human perspective), with a mission that they could not ignore. Given a clear sense of direction, these people worked hard, overcame big obstacles, and invented things that had never been seen before, all to bring their visions to life.

You could go through the motions until you drop from exhaustion, but you cannot willfully recreate this pattern of success.

For those of us who have the capacity to receive the poke from an angel, the gift (if you can call it that) of this kind of inspiration, we still have very little control over how and when the angels of inspiration will visit us. I've written at length about how to encourage inspiration in your life and how to make the most of it when it arrives, but inspiration still remains a force that is fundamentally outside our control.

Here's some forewards advice about visualization: A strong, clear vision of a possibility is a good sign that that might be a good goal to pursue. But if you can't seem to visualize a creative goal, or if it's a weak, confused image, that might be a sign that it's not the right goal, or that the time isn't ripe for you to pursue it.

If you are struck by a powerful, vivid, detailed picture of something, something that seems cool and exciting and worthwhile, you might want to consider adopting that as your goal — even when it seems to go against ordinary business logic and common sense. That clear and vivid image just might be a hint that you have an opportunity to accomplish something extraordinary.

The Tommy fallacy

2011-05-05T17:57:00.007-04:00

Imitation is a powerful way to learn new skills, but the specific techniques and strategies that worked for other people won't necessarily work for you.

In the Who's rock opera Tommy, the title character experiences enlightenment and healing through obsessive practicing of pinball games. (Pinball is a mechanical predecessor to video games.) But when Tommy urges others to play pinball and follow his path to enlightenment, it doesn't work for other people. They play and play, but they only become frustrated, not enlightened.

The moral of the story is that everyone has to find their own path to enlightenment. A spiritual path is a personal thing, and if you randomly follow someone else's path, it won't necessarily work for you.

Guess what? This lesson applies to more than just your spiritual life. The path to success in life is just as personal as the spiritual path (and that's assuming that those two things can even be considered separately, which is debatable). And what about your path as a creative artist? That path is most emphatically a uniquely personal thing that you must discover yourself.

The Tommy syndrome is the misguided (but understandable) tendency of coaches, mentors, and advisors to expect their students to repeat their own path to success, no matter how ill-fitting it is.

The Tommy fallacy is the incorrect assumption that you can achieve the same results that someone else achieved, just by copying all of that person's actions. It's the assumption that you can do great stuff by carefully studying and exactly copying someone else's process for doing great stuff.

In practice, this copying process sometimes partly succeeds, but it often utterly fails. Imitating people who are good at something is a fastest and powerful way to learn — but you still have to find your own way to success.

Why doesn't it work to copy someone else? There are several reasons why it fails.

Everyone is different, with a unique set of strengths, limitations, interests, and values.
You're in a particular time, place, and set of circumstances. It's never a match for the situation of the person you're trying to copy.
While some behaviors are obvious and easy to copy, some behaviors are subtle and hard to discern — and these subtle differences sometimes make a big difference.
Noteworthy success is rarely a one-person effort, and key contributions can come from invisible supporting players who chose to stay out of the spotlight.

But the key flaw, the centerpiece of the Tommy fallacy, is this:

The successful person you're imitating did what they did as a natural expression of who and where they were and what they wanted to achieve. The one thing they didn't do is copy someone else's actions.

As a creative artist, you can certainly pick up tricks and techniques from others and use them as raw material. But you fundamentally can't find your creative way by copying someone else's path. This is a practical thing; not some moralistic imperative to "be original." The creative process simply doesn't work if you put someone else in the space where you are supposed to stand.

You, the artist, are the catalyst that sparks the chemical reaction. You provide the transformative space that makes magic happen. And the magic only works if you are whole and intact, taking ownership of the creative process and taking responsibility for the results.

But don't trust me on this. I don't want to be just another one of those coaches, mentors, and advisors that I warned you about eight paragraphs back. Check this out for yourself, and see what your own experiences tell you.

Of course you worry about what people will think

2011-05-04T18:16:00.004-04:00

It's important to be cool. It matters that people notice and like the things that you've created. It's the very rare artist who doesn't care what people think of their work. Most of us are driven to create in order to communicate something profound that can't be properly expressed in ordinary words. It's a powerful and reassuring experience for the artist when someone in the audience gets that message and acknowledges it.

But there's a pitfall: If you focus on what other people will think of your work, you won't be able to create.

Remember that you can't enter the creative state of mind unless you feel confident that your work will make a difference. And the definition of "makes a difference" is very flexible — it depends almost completely on what you focus your attention on. If your attention is on what other people might think of your work, how can you feel confident? Other people's reactions are almost entirely outside of your control.

Here's my suggestion: Do your creative work on Tuesday night; then worry about whether you're cool or not on Wednesday afternoon. If those worries start to creep into Tuesday night, gently brush them aside, saying, "Please, just hold onto that very important thought, and bring it up in our Wednesday afternoon worry session, when we will cover it in exhaustive detail."

You may, of course, adjust the schedule to suit your own calendar. The point is that worrying about people — which is an undeniably important matter in life — must go into a different time slot from your creative work sessions.

Avoiding "inspiration inflation"

2011-05-03T19:34:00.005-04:00

In the past few days, we've looked at a few unhealthy ways that your creative goals can become oversized and thus too big for you to handle. But there's also a perfectly normal process of inflation through which your goals grow larger, when you're filled with enthusiasm and under the influence of the overoptimism that often comes with inspiration.

For example, you have a great idea for a song, and before you even write it, the idea grows into a concept album in which the song is the centerpiece. Your story idea becomes a novel, and then a trilogy.

One thing I've pointed out before as a songwriting coach — and it applies in any creative field — is that any idea can be done at any size, large or small, and on any "budget," simple or elaborate. Don't let your ideas, no matter how brightly they glow, tell you what size they have to be. Make them fit into your creative context in a way that supports your large-scale career goals. In other words, be practical in setting the size of each project.

How do you know when an idea has gotten too big for you? One sure tipoff is if you put off working on your idea until tomorrow, because it seems too daunting to handle today. The sobering truth is that if you put off your project even once, there's a fair chance that you will never complete it. If it's too big to handle today, it's probably destined for the junkyard of brilliant projects that you never got around to working on.

So go ahead and take out that pruning saw today. Cut your project down to a size that you can handle right now. Don't think of it as diminishing your idea or undermining your own inspiration. On the contrary, scaling it down means rescuing it from oblivion. It didn't take any time or effort for your idea to grow oversized, and it shouldn't cause you any pain to scale it back down again.

I make a rule to resist the temptation to make a project bigger until I've gotten the first version of it basically completed. Then, if I still have plenty of energy and enthusiasm, and if the idea seems to have room to grow, I can still go for it. But I don't want my ideas to swell up before I actually start working on them. (My junkyard of abandoned projects is a very large junkyard.)

What I've learned is that inspiration often arrives with its special kind of optimism. This burst of optimism can can give you a big push to start working, but it has a dangerous pitfall: it seriously distorts your judgment about how much work the project will take.

You might feel sure that something will take just one hour from start to finish, and before you know it, you've stayed up working all night, and you still seem to be "just one hour" away from finishing.

When your estimates can be off by an order of magnitude, that means that any little addition to the project might be ten times as expensive as you think they are. So it's prudent to be firm about limiting your ideas and pushing back when they want to get bigger. Figure out what part of the project is truly essential, and chop away everything else.

Again, the appropriate time for your project to grow is after you've already finished creating the first version of it.

If you're just plain discouraged

2011-05-02T13:58:00.000-04:00

I've spent a few days talking about how artists get themselves trapped holding impossibly large goals, goals that they can't even begin to pursue because they don't believe in their ability to complete them.

As I keep saying, if you don't believe you can do it, your mind is literally unable to enter the creative state that makes creative work possible. The belief that you can't becomes self-fulfilling truth, as you find yourself stuck, unable to move forward.

Now, these beliefs have very tenuous basis in physical reality. They come from our interpretations of past events and lessons, haphazardly applied to hypothetical future scenarios.

Sometimes the only thing holding you back is the misguided belief "I can't." Your goals aren't unrealistic or inflated; instead, your self-confidence is undersized.

Maybe you had parents who told you a thousand times, "You never do anything right." Maybe your junior-high-school music teacher told you, "You're not very good at music." Maybe your first performance experiences were painful humiliations.

And it's not just experiences from your past that knock down your self-confidence. There might be people in your life today who intentionally undermine your self-esteem. For example, bullies and psychic vampires who enjoy building themselves up by putting other people down. Or there might be family member or close friends who have begun to sense the positive vibes coming from your creative work; they might (correctly) fear that your success will change the dynamics of your tangled, dysfunctional relationships.

I can't go into detail about how to protect yourself against toxic people and clean up relationship messes — there are plenty of experts in that area who can guide you — but do whatever you have to do to keep their energy out of your creative space. Probably the single most important thing you can do in this regard is to keep the details of your creative work secret, except perhaps for a few trusted, supportive friends whom you select.

If you have family members who are threatened by your independence and success, don't give them a reason to push back. Instead, come up with a pathetic-sounding cover story. All that guitar playing that people can hear coming from your room? Don't tell them you're halfway through recording your debut album on Garage Band. Tell them you're just learning to play along with some Radiohead songs.

Anyway, if a legacy of people trying to discourage you has left you feeling thoroughly beaten down and discouraged, a feeling you've internalized as "I can't," then I have good news: There is a proven antidote. What you need is a massive infusion of encouragement, a steady diet of "I can." Find supportive people, and look up books of affirmations and other encouraging materials. It takes time to tip the balance against years of discouraging voices, but it absolutely can be done.

Meanwhile, don't try to push ahead with goals if you really can't muster the belief that you can do them. But start with smaller and simpler creative goals, and see if you're willing to suspend your disbelief in yourself and give them a try. It doesn't matter how small you start, because if you keep gradually moving to bigger challenges, you'll be doing big, impressive things before you know it. A pattern of success will help you feel bolder, and you'll build a habit of saying "I can."

What are you trying to prove?

2011-05-01T13:11:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I described the creative artist's equivalent of being stuck in a one-way cul-de-sac. When your goals are so big that you can't believe you can achieve them, but lesser goals seem too insignificant to bother pursuing, then you have no way to move forward. It's a trap that many artists wander into, and once there, you can feel very, very stuck.

But remember, as I explained just a few days ago, although the condition of being stuck is very real and nothing to joke about, it nonetheless is not a physical trap. It's a mental trap. And sometimes it's possible to think your way free.

To start with, you might ask yourself: How did an impossibly-big goal become the only goal that I'm willing to think about?

Or, you could be blunt about it, and ask yourself: What am I trying to prove? And who am I trying to prove it to?

Are you asking your creative process to carry the burden of problems from your financial life, your social life, your troubled relationships, wounds from your childhood? Are you asking your creative output to redeem yourself, to prove your worthiness, to make up for past sins or errors?
If so, that might be more than your muse can handle. Who wouldn't freeze up under that kind of pressure?

The point is, if you let these external concerns govern your creative life, then it can cause a kind of ambition inflation, where only huge and heroic projects seem worthwhile, and only over-the-top, best-in-the-world results seem adequate.

Do what you have to do to disentangle your creative process from these pressures. If necessary, swear off for a few months any goal that sounds even faintly ambitious or impressive, and let your muse just have some fun with absurd and whimsical goals. Write some short songs about snails and other small, lowly animals. Write fanciful essays about random objects found on the roadside. Draw sketches of office supplies and electronics accessories.

And this would be the perfect time to get Julia Cameron's terrific book, The Artist's Way. Her book is a 12-week course designed to heal and strengthen your relationship with what she calls your inner artist, which I call your muse.

Now, I feel I have to mention, as an aside, that there's nothing wrong with trying to prove something — if you do it in a way that doesn't break your creative process. Instead of letting that impulse distort your planning process and steer you towards bigger and grander goals, bring in into the studio and let it goad you into doing better and stronger work.

And there's nothing wrong with bringing your social woes, your relationship problems, your childhood wounds, and all the darkness of your soul into the studio as raw material. The magical alchemy of the creative process can transform all of that dark stuff into works of transcendent beauty and set you free of the past. The trick is to bring that stuff inside the creative process as fertile material instead of letting it sit on top of the process like some kind of taskmaster.

Staring down a brick wall?

2011-04-30T12:13:00.001-04:00

As I explained in the last two posts, to get started on creative work, you need to believe both "I can get this done" and "This will make a difference."

Basically, this means picking a goal that's small enough that you can actually complete it, but important enough that you'll have some enthusiasm for the effort.

Bad news! Those two categories don't always overlap.

Sometimes, I have found myself in an unlucky place where everything that's big enough to matter seems too big for me to tackle today. And everything I can imagine actually getting done today seems so small, it makes me say "what's the point?"

For example, suppose I'm inspired to create some great music that's more or less like the best work of Yes or Genesis. But what I can realistically achieve right now sounds more like rough demos from the roommate of some guy in the local AC/DC tribute band.

Or suppose I have a great idea for a novel. But I know if I sit down and try to start writing, the results will be such poor storytelling that I'll just end up throwing the pages away.

Have you ever been in a situation like this, where the gap between your wishes and your talents seems insurmountably large? It's discouraging! The result is that I do nothing at all. I waste the whole day, and then I feel guilty about it.

Success coaches tell you you can pursue any goal, no matter how large. The theory is that you can break the goal down into pieces, and then break the pieces into pieces, until your reach the level where each piece is small enough that you can tackle it. Frankly, that approach is wrong, and it doesn't work in real life. They missed a key fact: each of those pieces needs to be significant enough on its own that you'll feel it makes a difference to complete it. If tiny piece #1 doesn't pass that test, then you'll be locked out of the creative state of mind, and you won't be able to make any progress at all.

Don't hack your dream into pieces. That's not how real-world successes are made.

If you can think of a piece of your big goal that you can handle today, even it it's a small piece, then go ahead and get started.

But some goals are just too big. Sometimes you have to say, "This is a worthy goal, but clearly it's something I'm not ready for yet." (How do you know you're not ready? Because you're not taking action on that goal!)

What you might look for instead is a goal that you can believe in — something that at least puts you in a stronger position to consider taking on your bigger goal.

For example, I might put that novel aside and sign up for a fiction writing class. By doing the class assignments, I'll improve my writing skills and perhaps become the kind of writer who can realistically tackle big projects like the novel I'm thinking about.

You're a creative person, so apply your creativity to your career strategy. If you find that you're not moving forward, don't keep bruising yourself against an unyielding brick wall.

Who says you have to proceed on a straight-line path to your goal? That doesn't even sound creative! It might turn out that the shortest distance between your two points is some kind of crazy fractal n-dimensional Celtic spiral. Do something that you can do today, even if it might seem like a crazy whim, an irrational side trip. Trust your muse to lead you down the right path, and you'll find yourself in a better spot tomorrow.

Two little beliefs that rule the world

2011-04-29T18:05:00.000-04:00

Before creative work can begin, you must have two beliefs in place: you must believe that you can get the work done, and you must believe that it will make a difference.

Let me point out that these two areas of belief have no basis in physical reality.

In reality, the feasibility of a task is unknown until you actually do it. At best, you can make an informed estimate of whether a task is achievable by comparing it to similar tasks that you or someone else completed in the past.

But -- especially in creative work -- each task is unique and brings its own circumstances and surprises. A task that seems impossible may prove to be possible thanks to unexpected help from the universe. A task that seems easy and routine may bring unexpected pitfalls.

The truth is, you don't know whether you will succeed until you actually try. Nevertheless, we hold definite beliefs about what we can and cannot do. If a creative goal falls into the "cannot" category, it's as good as failed, because you will not even get started.

But consider this: You have the power to change your beliefs. If you believe that you can change your beliefs, then anything can be put into the "possible" category. (Wrap your brain around that!)

You can choose to change your beliefs -- but usually the simpler course is to change your goal. Pick a goal that you already believe you can reach, and then you won't have to venture into these mental gymnastics.

(You don't have to repudiate your bigger goal when you switch to another, more believable goal. Just set that bigger goal aside and say that it's not ripe for action today.)

Just as there is no reality beneath "I can," there is no reality behind "makes a difference." It's a judgment based on your own values and perceptions.

Every action has an impact on the physical world. And every action impacts the mental world too! There's no objective measurement to say which of these impacts counts as "makes a different" and which of them count as "it doesn't matter." It's a purely subjective judgment.

You can change what "makes a difference" by changing your perceptions. If you find yourself thinking "What's the point?" that's a sign that your attention is focused on the wrong thing. You can choose what you focus on, and you can keep your eye on the place where your creative work matters. Then you'll be unstuck and able to get started. (More about this in future posts.)

These little beliefs, ghosts of the mental realm, with no solid basis in physical reality, nonetheless rule our lives. Without "yes, I can" and "yes, it will make a difference," you won't take action. But if both of those beliefs are in place, you are free to act. And the difference between action and inaction can make empires rise and fall, can determine the direction of our lives, can change everything.

These two beliefs may have no basis in physical reality, but physical reality is based on these beliefs. Look around you. Everything you see is there because someone believed something was possible and believed that it would make a difference.

"Yes I can" and "Yes it will"

2011-04-28T19:57:00.007-04:00

What elements must be in place for a successful round of creative work? First of all, there are two things that are fundamentally necessary. You must have:

An idea or goal, or a problem to solve, an inspiration, a vision, an opportunity, an irritant — something that gives you a direction for your work
A set of resources to work with, for example: time, a pencil, a guitar, and your accumulated knowledge of music and rhyme

These two things are so basic that they apply in any realm of human activity. So let's set them aside for now and look at another pair of essential conditions that apply specifically to creative work.

You must believe that it's possible for you to complete the work, to reach the goal, to hit the target, whatever it is.
You must have hope that the work will make a difference. It's going to matter in some way to someone if you get this done.

To put it another way, you need to have a definite response for each of these doubts:

You can't do that.
What's the point?

For example, your responses could be:

I've done this before, and I can do it again. Just watch me!
This song idea won't leave me alone. I need to give it a try and see what happens.

Now, when I say these two things are essential, it's not hyperbole. They are absolutely necessary. You simply won't be able to move forward without them.

Creative work is different from most ordinary activities, where you can go ahead and attempt something even if you are sure you will fail, and where you can take actions even if you feel certain that your efforts are futile.

Life is full of half-hearted efforts and pointless tasks. You can drive to the store even if you know that it's closed. You can donate a dollar to the Save the Theater Fund even if it seems impossible for them to raise enough money by their deadline. You can paint the first third of the wall even if you know there isn't enough paint to do the rest.

But you can't do this in creative work. You can't enter the creative state of consciousness unless you actually believe that you can succeed and that it will make a difference. Without access to the creative state, you can't get your creative work done. You'll sit there with your goal, feeling impatient and frustrated that you aren't starting to work on it. You might try any number of motivational tricks to get yourself moving, but none of them will do any good.

To flip this insight around, we can say that creative work requires a specific kind of self-confidence and optimism. If you feel confident in your abilities and optimistic about your results, the creative state will open up its doors for you, and then you'll be able to get your creative work done — and you will actually have a chance at getting some positive results.

For artists, self-confidence and optimism tend to be self-fulfilling. Confident and optimistic artists are more likely to be successful. If you want to be a creative artist, don't try to be soberly realistic about your prospects; that's a losing strategy. You're actually better off having an inflated sense of your own talents and a rosy view of your successful future. (Just don't quit your day job.)

It will take another dozen blog posts for me to fully explore this important subject. For now, if you find yourself creatively stuck, ask yourself these questions:

Do I really believe that I can complete this work/reach this goal/solve this problem?
If not:

What is something that I actually can do, something that will put me in a stronger position to face this main goal?
What is a simpler, smaller, or narrower version of this project, one that I would have a better chance of completing?
What is the key obstacle that makes this task seem so daunting? Is there a way that I can tackle that one difficult aspect head-on?
Are there people around me who are trying to discourage me and undermine my confidence? Am I carrying around negative, self-defeating thoughts?

Do I really feel that completing this work will make a difference?
If not:

What would actually make a difference?
Can I focus on a different aspect of this work, one where the difference it makes is easier to see and quantify?
What if everyone in the world went ahead with efforts like this one? Or what if everyone in the world gave up on efforts like this one? Would that add up to a difference that I would notice?

The non-negotiable importance of yourself

2011-04-27T20:15:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I blogged about a special state of consciousness that's required for creative work -- the "creative state." This creative state is a source of vexation for artists, because it's so not under our control -- it's the Unruly Beast in this blog's title.

You can't enter the creative state at will, even if your life depends on it; but it emerges spontaneously whenever the conditions are right and you give yourself an interesting enough problem to solve.

When the creative state hides out on artists, we might feel lost and worried (and other negative emotions). There are plenty of creative chores we can do in our normal states of consciousness, but it's a little painful and unnerving (and usually unsuccessful) when we try to do our primary creative work without benefit of the creative state. We might say, "Crap! I'm no good at this! I'm a phony and a failure as an artist!" Or, if we recognize what's going on, we might say, "I feel blocked. My creative juices are not flowing."

If this happens to you, it should make you feel better to know that this is something that every artist has to deal with at some time or other. It doesn't mean you're a fake or a failure, but it might mean that there's something wrong in your life that needs some attention.

There is one common theme that runs through most of cases of creative blockage. If you find yourself unable to enter the creative state, it might well be that you have negated yourself in some way. You've neglected yourself, left yourself out of the picture.

If you did, it's understandable. Everything in our culture teaches us to negate ourselves. In school our opinions, experiences, and knowledge have no value, and we must temporarily put them aside in favor of whatever the teacher or textbook is presenting. In religion, sports, military, jobs, and even in the "creative and performing arts," the truth is that suppressing or even sacrificing yourself in favor of the team's or institution's goals and values is usually the successful strategy.

But suddenly you arrive at actual creative work, and the rules are different. You can't do it without yourself. Even if you want to sacrifice yourself for the sake of the greater good, to create a glorious work of art, it just doesn't work. You, as the artist, are the vessel in which the miraculous transformation occurs, from base raw materials to golden new creations. If you're not a whole and intact vessel, the magic cannot take place.

It's surely no coincidence that many successful artists are egomaniacs with a greatly exaggerated sense of their own importance. Not that you have to be a jerk to be an artist, thank goodness; there are also plenty of examples of gracious and humble people at the top of every creative field. But having a strong sense of your own value and importance really does help. So don't be embarrassed to put on your superstar cap in private while you're working.

Here are some examples of negating yourself. Any of these things can be the cause of a creative block:

Trying to create something for an assignment that doesn't make sense to you. You can't afford to ignore your own doubts about the assignment.
Trying to work in a style that you don't understand. If you don't feel that the style belongs to you, you won't be able to create in it.
Pretending to be something that really isn't what you are.
Trying to create something that will live up to someone else's standards. For example, you can't write a "#1 hit," because the hit charts are beyond your understanding and control.
Trying to create something "good enough" that it will magically change some circumstance in your life. For example, if your goal is to write a song so good that your bandmates will have to respect you, you probably won't be able to write anything at all.

The solution, in a general sense, is to find the way to own what you're doing. If you must create for a class assignment that you think is silly, bring that opinion into your creative space, and discover your way of doing the assignment — perhaps sarcastically.

You can use the circumstances of your life as raw material, but not as rules to govern your creative work. Instead, create things that suit your own standards, create in your own style, do it your own way, and please your own ear.

In my next post, I'll talk about two key conditions that are necessary for entering the creative state, and I'll look at some of the common thoughts and attitudes that can interfere with one or both of those keys.

The creative state of consciousness

2011-04-26T20:11:00.004-04:00

Creativity — at least for part of the process — requires a special state of consciousness. In this special state, the brain is temporarily reconfigured in a way that allows most of your conscious processing power to be devoted to a single problem or question.

Any worthwhile creative project is a complicated problem that can make good use of this extra brain power. I often say that creative tasks are multidimensional problems, which means that they include several independent variables that interact with each other in nontrivial ways.

This kind of multidimensional problem can tax the capabilities of today's powerful computers, even if the problem can be precisely defined — but how often is your creative challenge precisely defined? Usually its definition is fuzzy, defined in an incomplete and imprecise way. And still, our brilliant minds can tackle these fuzzy multidimensional problems and come up with elegant solutions that are entirely new, never-seen-before creations.

Hopefully you can see why the brain would need to rewire itself temporarily in order to tackle the difficult problems that come up in creative work. In the creative state, the parts of the brain that keep track of people and relationships temporarily turn themselves into extra computational units for your creative work. So do the parts of the brain that keep track of where you are, who you are, what time it is, and the things you have to do.

Obviously, it's not safe or wise or practical to enter this creative state of mind very often. You wouldn't want to wander around unfamiliar woods in a creative state of mind, forgetting where you are, forgetting that bears are dangerous, and forgetting that you should get back home before dark. For very good reasons, evolution has created a bias against the creative state of mind, making it temporary and fragile.

The fragility of the creative state is one thing that makes our work as creative artists so delicate. We need this special, expanded state of mind in order to do our work, but we cannot force it to happen. We can't push our brains into a creative state, no matter how hard we try. And all sorts of perfectly ordinary situations, such as complicated relationships, time pressure, and anxiety about upcoming events, can prevent the creative state from occurring. If you feel time pressure, for example, the part of the brain that keeps track of time can't release itself to become an extra computational unit for your complex multidimensional problem.

After all this bad news about the creative state, I'll leave you with some good news. First of all, you're already above average in your creative capabilities. That's why you're reading this blog about creativity. For most people, this blog would be verging on nonsensical, because they've never experienced the creative state of consciousness that I'm writing about.

The second piece of good news is that you can practice entering the creative state and learn to do it more reliably over time.

And the third piece of good news is that you can actively manage the elements that are necessary for the creative state, and also proactively deal with things that are likely to interfere with the creative state. Those specifics will be the subject of my next few blog posts.

Angels with sticks

2011-03-12T13:13:00.000-05:00

Forgive me being obsessed; I'm still thinking about the phenomenon of creative people not getting started. I'm haunted by the thought of a vast garden of creative potential, with most of it wilting and dying — only a few scattered spots here and there getting watered and bursting forth with bright flowers.

If we tend our garden just a little bit better, we could have many more flowers.

Now, it's perfectly okay if people don't want to create anything. Not everyone is an artist by nature, and that's fine. What troubles me is the people who do want to create, who feel called to some very specific form of artistry, but who find themselves blocked, unable to start doing the work that they want to do.

They're left perpetually frustrated, in a state of suspense. And it can't be good for one's health or happiness to be simultaneously pulled by something and held back from it.

At the same time, we all lose the value of whatever it was the artist was impelled to — and failed to — create. It's not that the world really needs more songs, more movies, or more novels. What the world need is more of the fruits of authentic inspiration. These are the things that are so powerful, so necessary, that the muses or angels (or whoever they are) are willing to intrude in some poor human's life and poke him with a stick until he creates the thing they demand.

Think of the angel whose job it is to hold the stick and poke, poke, poke the artist. Angels are not sadistic torturers by nature; they don't really want to cause pain. We can be sure that the creations that they are hoping to birth are truly valuable and would more than make up for the artist's temporary discomfort. But it only works if we, the artists, are able to follow through and actually create the work.

There are many potential pitfalls. The artist might not have the vocabulary to express the message. The artist might fail to grasp the message clearly, and lose most of it in the translation. But the most common pitfall, I'm afraid, is that the artist just doesn't do anything. He thinks he can't succeed, so he doesn't even try.

What I'm looking for is leverage — some way to intervene to make this creative process just a little smoother and more efficient. It should be better for everyone. Less poking for the angels, less pain for the artists, more flowers in our garden.

And the solution has to be something more than just asking artists to employ extra willpower and determination. Being an artist is hard enough without pushing even harder. In fact, my gut feeling is that the answer, if there is one, must involve making things easier.

Dump your Grand Brilliant Scheme

2011-03-10T20:13:00.005-05:00

Last month I blogged about my participation in the February Album Writing Month challenge at fawm.org. On the 9th day of the challenge, I observed that four out of five people who signed up hadn't written a single song, a startlingly high percentage of no-shows. At the end of the challenge, 19 days later, only a few more people had ventured past the starting line. The month ended with more than 77% of members missing in action, less than 23% actively participating.

Every time I run through these sobering numbers, I have to emphasize that signing up for the FAWM challenge was completely voluntary, and the great majority signed up after February 1st. So this wasn't a situation where someone thought it was a good idea a few months ago and then forgot all about it. People who signed up knew they had to get started pretty much right away.

The good news is that there was a surge of activity toward the end of the month, and almost half of those who actually got started ended up being declared "winners" because they'd posted at least 14 songs.

The grim news from FAWM's statistics: If you don't get started sooner, you aren't likely to get started later.

(It's even worse than the stats look. Most of the improvement in FAWM's averages came from people who joined late in the month with an immediate burst of activity, not from people switching into gear after sitting idle.)

Putting things off is a habit that gains momentum. It's a pattern that gets harder and harder to break.

Be honest with yourself today: If you still haven't taken the first step in your Grand Brilliant Scheme, you probably will never take that step. Your Grand Brilliant Scheme is already as good as dead. It's inexorably being sucked into that black hole, and you don't have the leverage to pull it back out.

There's a good reason to be brutally honest. Opportunity is knocking: an opportunity to do something much less Grand and much less Brilliant than your Grand Brilliant Scheme. But this new opportunity has a trump card: It's something you can take action on. Something you can actually get started on today. In other words, it's real.

Take that new opportunity, however modest it may seem, and let your long-postponed G.B.S. spiral into its black hole.

We all have a bad habit of discounting the value of today's immediate opportunities, and exaggerating the value of things that are out of our reach. We also overstate the value of ideas and take for granted the value that comes from action. There are plenty of great ideas — but the only ideas that matter are the ones you can actually do something with.

New rule of thumb: If you can't start on something today, it's not a creative project; it's just a daydream. It's fine to have daydreams — but your creative life should be filled with action, not just a fantasy of maybe someday.

Whose style?

2011-03-08T21:59:00.003-05:00

A quick question for songwriters and recording artists: Do you own your musical style?

If not you, who owns it? Who gets to decide whether your music is styled correctly? Who do you have to answer to?

Of course, as a professional you sometimes have to do music that isn't in your own style, if that's what the job requires. But, when that job is done and you return to your own style, are you as easy, confident, and comfortable as you are in your own home?

If not -- if you find yourself looking over your shoulder as you make music, if you feel self-conscious, if you're eager to please -- then you just might have some ownin' to do.

Make yourself comfortable

2011-02-22T20:33:00.003-05:00

Are you comfortable in your creative space?

If you have a specific room where you do your creative work, does it have comfortable seating, good lighting, and the tools that you need at hand? Does walking into the room inspire you, or does it make you feel uneasy?

If you use a computer for your creative work, are you comfortable with it? Do you know where to find all the files and applications that you might use in a project? Do you know how to use your software, or do you need to take some time to get familiar with how it works? Do you have secure backups of all of your files? Do you trust your computer to do what you need it to do -- or does the computer make you feel uneasy?

Is there anything that would make you hesitate to write down a thought in your notebook or on a piece of paper? I remember a music professor suggesting to his students that we draw musical staves on scratch paper, rather than using up a sheet of music paper for every new idea. The suggestion seemed quaint, even to poor students, but the idea behind it was solid. If you're afraid of making the first mark on a piece of paper, because the idea might look dumb and "ruin" the perfect, clean piece of paper, then you better get yourself some paper that you won't be afraid t0 use. Use scratch paper, if that makes you feel freer about scribbling down ideas. Or buy several reams of paper if that's what it take to quash your fear of "using up" your paper supply.

Getting even more abstract about the idea of "creative space," do you feel at ease in the act of creating something? Or do you worry about living up to other people's standards? Are the critical voices of music teachers, parents, peers, and critics echoing in your head as you try to create?

I could go on, but you get the idea. Make a top-to-bottom inventory of the uneasy and uncomfortable elements in your creative life — and find ways to resolve all of them.

Make yourself at home.

If you're stuck

2011-02-21T13:22:00.005-05:00

If you find yourself blocked creatively, having a clear goal but not able to move forward, ask yourself this: Are you trying to start from someplace other than where you are right now?

If you're setting out on a long journey, for example, to New York City, it's understandable to think, "That's impossibly far! I can't get there if I start from here. I'll have to set out from Trenton, which is sort of close to New York City." It's natural to wish you were already closer to your destination, but, in reality, the only place you can start from is right here, exactly where you are right now.

This is easy to understand in the realm of physical travel, but reality is just as central and unbending in the realm of creative ambitions. You can only start from exactly where you are right now. And if you find that you're paralyzed and unable to move forward towards your goal, it might be because you're trying to do the impossible. You might be trying to take your first step forward from Trenton, before you've even made the trip to Trenton.

If so, it's time to reframe your questions. Instead of asking, "How can I get from Trenton to New York?" try asking yourself, "Where can I get to from here, if I just start moving?"

I'll have more to say about this soon, in a non-riddle format.

The Things You Didn't Do

2011-02-20T13:30:00.000-05:00

Last week I made an observation about the overall progress of songwriters in this month's FAWM challenge. With the month one-third over, 80% of participants still hadn't posted their first song. Now the month is two-thirds over, and that number is creeping downward, but only slightly: the proportion of no-shows has dropped to about 78%.

FAWM's participants are all people who recently and voluntarily took on the challenge of writing 14 songs this month. You'd expect some proportion of procrastinators, the overcommitted (who don't realistically have the time for this extra activity), and the disorganized (who, for example, lose the domain name or lose their password) — but it's sobering to see that the non-starter faction is such a large majority.

It makes me wonder what the world would be like if just a few percent more creative people followed through on the things that they said they were going to do, or got started on the things that they secretly know they should do. It makes me wonder just how many people wimp out on the very things that they were born to do, who find some excuse or other to back away from their true life's work.

There's no one in the world who can hold you accountable for the things that you didn't do. Until you actually go ahead and do them, no one even knows that those things are on the threshold of possibility.

It's all up to you, the artist, to find the courage, the discipline, and the resources to bring your secrets to life. If you can't manage it, it's okay — apparently Just Not Doing It is the overwhelming choice of people with a creative calling. But if a few percent more of us could find the way to follow a few more of our visions, the world would be a noticeably richer place.

Making quick decisions

2011-02-19T12:57:00.003-05:00

I reached my goal of writing 14 new songs for the 2011 February Album Writing Month challenge, and I was able to stay on the schedule of writing a new song every day for 14 days in a row.

After boldly claiming that writing 14 song would be easy, it was a bigger effort than I planned on. Even the simplest of songs took me a few hours to write, and finding a few extra hours a day, even for something as fun as songwriting, is no easy thing.

Pressing that "non-negotiable" daily goal against my tight schedule forced me to find ways to simplify things and to make decisions quickly and to keep going, when normally I would have been overcome by the accumulation of complexity and uncertainty. Without a deadline, I certainly would have put many of those songs aside in the middle of writing them, planning to pick them up another day when — hopefully — I'd have a fresh perspective that would help me see how to proceed.

But this month, setting things aside was not an option, and when pressed I found I could make some of those difficult decisions, I could dodge the messiest tangles, and I could get a song done by the end of the evening. Can't think of a bridge? Hey, you know what, this song is fine without a bridge!

Of course, the whole point of FAWM is to provide a arbitrary deadline so that songwriters can learn to push past obstacles like these and get their songs done.

I think my songs turned out just as good, maybe better, than if I'd given myself all the time I thought I needed. But, more important, the songs got finished — and, in reality, if I'd set all those songs aside to "finish later," less than half of them would ever have gotten finished.

Being decisive means making compromises, settling for things that you know aren't quite as good as they could be. But those compromises are less severe than they seem at the time. I can always return to the songs later and fix any problems that bug me, any weak rhymes or overly repetitive chord patterns. It's much easier to tinker with a finished song and polish up the details than it is to take a half-finished song and get it finished.

Being decisive — being willing to make decisions quickly even when you're not sure — is one of the key strengths that you need as a creative artist in any field. Creating anything brand new requires diving into the pool of infinite possibilities. But the only way to get yourself back out of that pool with a new creative work is to make some decisions — many, many decisions. Most people won't even dip their toes in; they find it too unsettling and bewildering to have that many options open. It challenges their confidence in the solidity of reality. That's why we need to have artists. Artists are specialists in making decisions.

Just Getting Started

2011-02-09T19:56:00.004-05:00

The February Album Writing Month challenge is to write 14 new songs in 28 days. When I signed up for this year's challenge, I knew that my main obstacle would be finding time to write. Because I hate finding myself facing a deadline with time slipping away, I decided to proactively rule out that possibility by writing all of my songs in the first half of the month — a song every day, no matter what corners I had to cut to get the song finished.

It's now Day 9, and I've managed to write a song every day for nine days. Just five more days to go! As I foresaw, it has been a challenge finding time to write. And I very likely would have weaseled out of it by now, if I hadn't made my pledge so publicly. The pain of writing a weak song is much less than the embarrassment of falling short of what I said I would do. So I managed to make some quick decisions and get each new song wrapped up each day.

You know, sometimes you can tell it's time to stop working on a song, even if you're not completely happy with it. If the song makes some kind of understandable statement, if it's internally consistent, and if it lives up to the rules of a genre or musical style, then you might be done writing, even if the song doesn't seem to be very good. At that point, unless you can quickly think of a clear-cut way to improve the song, it's time to put the pencil down. The truth is, any changes you make after that point will probably just make the song worse. The song is what it is, and you'll just make it worse by fighting with it.

Luckily, my "surprisingly awesome" new songs outnumber my "disappointing weak" songs so far.

The biggest surprise in my FAWM experience so far is seeing the collective results from all of the songwriters who have signed up for the FAWM challenge. It takes some guts to sign up and say "Yes! I'm going to write 14 songs." It's like signing up to run a marathon, a 26-mile race. Just getting to the finish line is a proud accomplishment, and there's no shame if you make a valiant effort but just can't muster the strength to get to the end of the course.

But what's happened with FAWM is sobering. After finding the courage to sign up for the challenge, many of the songwriters have not yet been able to finish a single song — and the month is now one-third gone. Now you'd always expect a certain number of people to sign up for something on a whim, and then drop out, but this is more than that. More than 80% of participants haven't logged a single song yet.

To look at it from the other side, the entire body of FAWM 2011 songs, so far, has come from fewer than 20% of participants.

This tells me that, in the creative world, just getting started is the hurdle that weeds out most of the potential players.

And on the other side of it, just getting started — at whatever you hope to accomplish — is enough to make you immediately above average.

Sure, it's hard to get started. There are all sorts of obstacles: fear, and procrastination, and remembering where you left your staff paper. They must be big obstacles, because they defeat most of the people who face them.

What is your strategy for getting past this first and biggest hurdle?

If you noticed, I did three things at once: I set an incremental, non-negotiable deadline the first day (and every day); I made a public boast that would be hard for me to back down from; and I jumped into a social setting (at fawm.org) that made my daily accomplishments concrete and visible.

And this is what it takes to get started in a skill area where I've already proven my mastery. Now, we'll see how long it takes me to get started on recording my new album this year.

It's no joke; getting started is hard. But, when you do finally get started, you immediately stand out from the crowd. Because the crowds of people are all still just standing there, and you've taken one step forward.

Seed your creativity

2011-02-05T20:34:00.005-05:00

In computer programming, a seed is a bit of data that you throw into a quasi-random process. If the process is truly random, it shouldn't really matter what your inputs are, but using a new seed is an extra way of making sure that the output you get from the process is different from the output you got the last time.

In the same spirit, I suggest using a seed when you're are brainstorming (or idea grabbing) for new song ideas. The seed can be:

something that's on your mind, that you know you'd like to write about
something that's literally right in front of you, a random object in your environment
a word or phrase from any available random generator

Strange as it seems, it's easier to think of songs about "white trucks" (for example) than it is to think of songs about any possible subject. Somehow narrowing the field of options makes it easier for your creative mind to get started.

Try any of these random tools, or invent your own:

The Random Word Generator at watchout4snakes.com.
The Random Logline (story idea) Generator at lifeformz.com.
LyriCloud at fawm.org.
Cams Song Idea Generator at translunarwagontrain.com.
The Random Word Generator at creativitygames.net.
Flip through a dictionary or thesaurus without looking, and put your finger on a random word.
Jump to a random Wikipedia article.
Read a random page of quotations.
Find inspiration in this constantly-changing page of recent pictures at Flickr.

(Those last three items, by the way, are from a "random album cover" game making the rounds of Facebook. According to the game, the Wikipedia article supplies the band name, the last quotation on the page suggests your album title, and the third Flickr photo is your album cover art.)

I also have several decks of cards with words and ideas on them. Some are intended as creativity tools, like the Once Upon a Time storytelling cards. Some of my decks are leftover from word-oriented board games, dream interpretation games, and even song lyrics-oriented games. And some were meant as oracles (fortune-telling tools), but also happen to serve as random content tools. If you happen to come a similar deck of cards at a flea market or garage sale, I recommend buying it and adding it to your collection of creativity tools. It's fun to shuffle the cards and deal out a few seeds of song ideas.

Note: I apologize that my own Songwriting Assignment Generator is offline. I think it's just that my web host changed the PHP configuration, but I haven't had time to troubleshoot it.

My suggestion for how to get the most out of your brainstorming:

Pick a seed at random from any of these sources
Start a timer or stopwatch for a short period of time (3 minutes at most), and race to write down as many possible song ideas as you can, based on the seed idea
When the time is up, pick a different random seed and start the timer again.

Grabbing a handful of ideas

2011-02-04T21:51:00.002-05:00

The word brainstorming is well established in the dictionary, but I can't help thinking there should be a better word. Brainstorming evokes images of neurons gone wild with chaotic bursts of high-energy activity, which in reality would be a frightening, perhaps life-threatening malfunction.

The focus shouldn't be on the brain, or even on the storm. There's a purpose to the process: to gather lots of new, non-obvious ideas. Because ideas slip away easily, they need to be captured — written down, in words that will still mean something the next day. Brainstorming is a form of gathering.

Imagine that someone on the upper level is tossing down colorful coupons by the thousands. You know that some of the coupons are for free coffee drinks and deep discounts on your favorite shoes, along with all sorts of other offers that you might or might not care about. You could sit on the floor and look through the coupons one at a time, hoping to find a few good ones. Or you could grab a big handful of them, as many as you could quickly gather up, and then go through them at your leisure later at the food court, with the help of a few friends.

Brainstorming is essentially the latter strategy. And it might be more accurately called idea grabbing, although that name has its own problematic overtones.

The traditional idea-collecting method, essentially the sitting-on-the-floor strategy, has never worked very well. People tend to stop when they have one or two workable ideas, while the floor is littered with much better ideas that remain undiscovered, even though they were easily within reach.

When you're gathering ideas for songs, don't settle for one or two ideas that are right in front of you. Grab up 20 or 50 ideas. Sure, many of those ideas will be kind of dumb, but you'll get several really good ones at the same time.

I'll list some specific techniques for brainstorming — or idea grabbing — soon.

Day 3 of Album Writing Month

2011-02-03T22:01:00.003-05:00

I'm trying to write one song per day for my February Album Writing Month project. If I can keep up with this, I'll reach the goal of writing 14 songs on 2/14, Valentine's Day, and then I can spend the second half of the month recording quick demos of some of these new songs.

In the past several years, most of my songwriting has been prompted by being struck by inspiration, or has been driven by a fairly specific assignment. It's a little harder to start writing "cold," with nothing to go on. I've turned to my file folder of song ideas collected over the years, and I've also resorted to random brainstorming, just casting about for any idea that catches me. So far I haven't found myself stuck with nothing to write about, but we'll see if the idea stream holds up for 11 more songs.

I encourage songwriters to keep a notebook of song ideas and to start collecting fragments of lyrics and music. Someday your music career might hinge on being able to write a solid album of songs on short notice, and that job will be a lot easier if you've provided yourself some material to start with.

Aim for the target (not the clouds)

2011-02-02T20:22:00.004-05:00

After yesterday's lengthy post about how to avoid the difficulties in the creative process, I realized that I left out a very important point.

When you're starting a songwriting session — or starting any creative work — take a sober and realistic look at the resources that are available for your song. Work within your budget, the business people say, and it's a principal that's just as important in music as in business, although the budget you're working with might not be measured in dollars. Work within the constraints of your actual situation.

Who is going to perform or record the song? For example, if you're going to perform it by yourself at a coffeehouse, then don't write vocal harmonies. There's only one singer.

If you're writing for a specific band, write for the band's actual talents, not for the band that you wish you had. If the band can't play funk to save their lives, don't write them a funk song. The band will sound bad, your song will sound bad, and everyone will be unhappy.

It doesn't matter how good a song sounds in your head. It's easy to have things sound good in your head. Your goal should be to have your songs sound good in reality. And I'm not talking about any possible reality, I'm talking about your actual current situation.

Does this mean you have to compromise your creative ideals and betray your timeless inspirations all because of some short-term shortcoming? Not at all! Protect those timeless inspirations. Put them in a file folder and save them for a time when your world is ready for them.

As a songwriter, you can avoid a lot of difficulties simply by writing things that are easy to write and easy to perform. Remember that a song isn't a good song in reality until someone actually delivers a good performance of it. And it's hard to do a good performance of a difficult song.

If you've signed up for February Album Writing Month, be realistic about what you can do withing the constraints of the FAWM challenge. To come up with 14 songs in 28 days, you need to finish a song every two days, and that's on top of work or school or anything else that your schedule demands of you.

This might mean you can only budget two or three hours to write each song. If that's the case, you might have to write shorter, simpler songs songs than you usually write.

Don't think of this as compromising your ideals; think of it as making up your mind that you're going to win this game.

After all, you don't reach a goal line by standing your ground. You get there by taking the ball and running.

Banish all difficulties

2011-02-01T21:03:00.003-05:00

After yesterday's pledge to write songs quickly and easily for this month's songwriting project, I nonetheless struggled for at least an hour with the melody and chords for today's song.

I had some music in my head, but it didn't sound right when I played through it. First I slowed down the tempo and added some ornamental chords at the beginning of each phrase. Then I tried different, simpler ornamental chords. It all fit together well enough, but I knew it still wasn't quite right. Finally the verse clicked into place when I shifted the start of the vocal line from the first beat to the second beat, and I changed the chord structure from four 2-bar phrases to two 4-bar phrases.

I'm happy with the results, but I already fell short of my goal of practicing simple, easy songwriting.

How do difficulties find their way into the creative process? First of all, I should be clear that there is a certain amount of honest work in writing lyrics and music. My favorite example of this is the fugue, a musical form in which three or four layered melodies interact with each other and simultaneously happen to create a musically meaningful implied chord line. Writing a fugue is like solving a multi-dimensional number puzzle.

Similarly, in the lyrics I wrote today, I had to find rhyming words and still tell an effective story. English offers a limited number of words and ways of saying things, so it can take some real work to make the pieces fit together while keeping the story as short as possible.

There is also unavoidably an element of emotional risk in any creative work. If you don't put anything at risk, you won't create much of value.

But besides these detailed, mechanical writing tasks, and the risk that an artist must take, there are also more than enough creative difficulties that are unproductive, unnecessary, and (somewhat) avoidable. When you struggle with your material as I did today, it's a sign that you aren't going with the flow of your creative process.

What interrupts the flow of creativity? The top culprit is trying to control the outcome. It's a paradox of being an artist: in theory, you have total control of every detail of your creation, but in practice, if you try to exert that control, the whole thing can grind to a halt or fall to pieces. You need to use a very light touch as you play with your creative materials. The song has to take its own shape, and at best you can guide it, ever so delicately, in the right direction.

But then you worry about how the song is shaping up. I need this song to be good. I want to impress my bandmates. I need a hit, already! I need to prove that I can still do this. These worries are all perfectly understandable, but you can't afford to bring them into the creative process. It's like carrying ten-pound weights in your hands — but these are the same hands that you're using to delicately guide the creation of the song. These extra weights, your worries, make your work clumsy and heavy-handed. You can pound your lifeless song into submission, but it won't be a song you enjoy performing.

You might not be able to stop worrying entirely, but you must find a way to set your worries aside, just temporarily, so you can write. Some writers ritually put their worries into a jar before beginning to write, and promise to take them back out again as soon as they're done with their writing session.

Another closely related way to interrupt your creative flow is to try to do something that is beyond your abilities. Again, this is understandable. Artists perpetually underestimate the value of the things they do easily — their strengths — and overestimate the importance of the things that they don't know how to do — their weaknesses.

It's good to systematically exercise your creative techniques, to build your strengths and turn weak areas into strengths. But do that in the form of technical exercises. Don't bring it into your regular songwriting. When you have a specific goal and a deadline, it's not time to stretch your technique. It's time to use the strengths that you already have.

So if you've signed up for February Album Writing Month — or if you have a real album to record and you need to write some songs in a hurry — go with your strengths. Go with what you already know. Write about things that you already care about. Write in musical styles that you are already comfortable with. Write in your own natural voice. Set all your worries aside and trust your creative process to do its best work. (It always will!) Then, let it flow. Let it be easy to write one song after another. You already have all the power, the talent, the ideas, and the resources that you need. Go to it!

Write 14 songs in February -- it's easy

2011-01-31T17:36:00.005-05:00

February Album Writing Month (http://fawm.org/) is about to begin. The FAWM challenge is to write 14 songs, roughly an album's worth, in 28 days. If this sounds difficult to you, then the FAWM challenge is exactly what you need — it's a deadline-driven opportunity to prove to yourself that songwriting doesn't have to be difficult.

Songwriting is supposed to be easy, and if you usually find it full of difficulties, you're making things unnecessarily hard for yourself. But even worse, you're probably also making things hard for your audience. As a rule of thumb, if a song is hard to write, it's also hard to listen to. Think about it. You're a specialist, an expert in the kind of music that you do. If a song is hard for you, how do you expect a general audience of non-musicians to tackle the song?

So if it's right for you, take the FAWM challenge. You can sign up right now at http://fawm.org. And, if you choose, you can also add my challenge, which is make February a month to practice writing songs quickly and easily, with no effort at all.

Where does all the effort come from? And how do you let go of it? I'll explain tomorrow.

5♠ Garbage in, beauty out

2010-11-10T18:06:00.000-05:00

5♠ Five of Spades in The Rock Songwriter’s Deck: 52 Ways to Write a Song

The Five of Spades believes you can make a beautiful song out of any set of materials, even garbage. You can take your inspiration from the visual artists who create unique sculptures out of things that they find in the trash.

You don't have to actually go dumpster diving, but find some way to gather a collection of random or happenstance element, just a pile of unrelated bits. (One quick, simple technique is to flip through books, drop your finger on a page, and take whatever phrase or sentence you happen to hit. Another technique is to do Google searches for a group of four or five randomly-chosen words, and use whatever happens to be in the middle of the page on the website that you find through your search.)

Once you've gathered your "pile of junk," start working with the pieces. Play with them, rearrange them, sort them, shuffle them. Eventually you will find them starting to fall into meaningful and interesting patterns. Keep working with your materials until you've molded them into a coherent song.

Believe it or not, this is the final card in The Rock Songwriter's Deck! I hope these exercises have helped you shake up your songwriting process and create some interesting new songs. You can review the entire deck by clicking the link for the "deck" tag on this blog.

8♣ Meet Captain Sledgehammer

2010-11-03T21:03:00.001-04:00

8♣ Eight of Clubs in The Rock Songwriter’s Deck: 52 Ways to Write a Song

The Eight of Clubs asks you to invent a colorful, interesting character, someone very different from yourself. Give your character a name, a history, habits, goals, values, and a cultural context.

When you've developed a clear and vivid picture of your character, write a song that would be a perfect expression of that character's motivations or personality.

5♥ Your weapon of choice

2010-10-27T21:01:00.002-04:00

5♥ Five of Hearts in The Rock Songwriter’s Deck: 52 Ways to Write a Song

The Five of Hearts asks you to let your angry emotions inspire you. Write as if your song were a weapon, and your intention is to hurt someone. It helps if you’re actually angry at someone. But if you're not, just pretend. (“It’s called acting!”)

It's likely that many fine songs were written this way, although you'd have to actually ask the songwriters to know for sure. In any case, anger is a powerful energy that can be used for constructive purposes in your creative life. So don't just sit there seething — write a song!

8♥ Round robin

2010-10-20T20:59:00.001-04:00

8♥ Eight of Hearts in The Rock Songwriter’s Deck: 52 Ways to Write a Song

Eight of Hearts suggests a songwriting game that you can't do by yourself. Gather a group of 3-6 songwriters for this game.

Here's how to play: Get a pad of paper, and sit around a table. Decide who gets to start. That person writes down a single line of lyrics, and passes the pad to the next person, who writes the second line of lyrics. As you continue, each person writes one line of lyrics in turn.

Don't talk, don't make suggestions, and don't coach each other. Each of you might have a different idea of where the song is headed, but none of you is individually able to control the direction the song is taking. Just let the song emerge.

"Slow Dancing Beast," on Left Brain's Raspberry Park album, was written this way. The songwriters used Scrabble Sentence Cubes, a game with words printed on dice, as a random element to create the first line of lyrics.

10♦ Write every day

2010-10-13T21:04:00.001-04:00

10♦ Ten of Diamonds in The Rock Songwriter’s Deck: 52 Ways to Write a Song

The Ten of Diamonds suggests that you try, for at least a week, the practice of writing a new song every day. And don't spend all day on it! The Ten of Diamonds insists that you spend an hour at most, from start to finish.

To fit this writing chore into your daily routine, you might have to scale down your expectations. Your song might be very short, or very simple, or very repetitive. It might express a simple and mundane idea that you wouldn't ordinarily think of as song material. Whatever you come up with, it's okay, as long as it's a new creation.

The next day, write another song. It's okay if the second day's song is just a variation on the first day's song, as long as it contains some new element that you've never used before.

Even if none of the songs from your daily writing practice are good enough to use, this practice will strengthen your songwriting skills in a powerful way. You're learning how to write in an easy, comfortable, everyday way. The next time someone hits you with a real-world songwriting assignment, you'll be able say, "No sweat! I can handle this. I write songs every day!"

7♠ All tied up and nowhere to go

2010-10-06T20:58:00.002-04:00

7♠ Seven of Spades in The Rock Songwriter’s Deck: 52 Ways to Write a Song

The Seven of Spades reminds us that creativity is spurred by necessity. Surprisingly creative solutions can emerge when you have to work within extreme constraints.

Can you write a convincing song that uses only two chords? How about a song that runs exactly two minutes and thirty-seven seconds in length?

Can you write an entire lyric using only one-syllable words? Or without using the letter "i"? Or limiting yourself to words that were in Shakespeare's vocabulary?

Decide on your own set of arbitrary constraints, and then see what song you're able to write within those limitations.

4♥ Collage

2010-09-29T20:56:00.002-04:00

4♥ Four of Hearts in The Rock Songwriter’s Deck: 52 Ways to Write a Song

The Four of Hearts asks you to collect a file folder of clippings, quotes, pictures — all things that evoke something for you or inspire you in some way.

Step two: Use the clipping to build a collage. Make the most beautiful and inspiring collage that you can with the materials that you have collected.

Step three: Write a song that expresses what the collage is expressing. Try to capture the emotional tone of the collage in music. Let the quotes and images in the collage suggest ideas for the song's lyrics.

9♠ Introducing Eddy & the Falcons

2010-09-22T20:55:00.002-04:00

9♠ Nine of Spades in The Rock Songwriter’s Deck: 52 Ways to Write a Song

Sometimes you are your own worst enemy. Or your own ball-and-chain. And sometimes the fastest route to a brilliant creative breakthrough is for you to pretend to be someone other than yourself.

The Nine of Spades invites you to invent a colorful, fictional rock band. Come up with an album title and the full list of song titles that would appear on the band's album. Then write at least one of the songs on behalf of your fictional band.

If you prefer, instead of a band you could invent a fictional solo artist or a stage musical.

Eddy & the Falcons is a fictional 1950s rock & roll band portrayed by the 1970s rock band Roy Wood's Wizzard on the album "Introducing Eddy & the Falcons." A more famous example is Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the fictional cabaret band portrayed by the Beatles.

3♥ Dear friend

2010-09-15T20:54:00.002-04:00

3♥ Three of Hearts in The Rock Songwriter’s Deck: 52 Ways to Write a Song

The Three of Hearts ask you to write a song as if you’re writing a letter to someone. Your song could be a stylized version of an almost-real message that you might write to someone you actually know. Or it could instead be purely fictional, based on an imagined situation where a made-up character needs to send a written message to someone.

Whether the message is based on real life or fiction, the feelings expressed by the song should be authentic and heartfelt.

Many songs have been based on a slight variation of this idea: a message that can never be delivered, for one reason or other. Unexpressed feelings can pile up, and writing a song seems to provide a way to bring those emotions to a conclusion.

If letter writing seems impossibly old-fashioned to you, write a song in the form of a text message or telephone message.

2♠ First build a framework

2010-09-08T20:53:00.001-04:00

2♠ Two of Spades in The Rock Songwriter’s Deck: 52 Ways to Write a Song

The Two of Spades invites you to work out the structure of a song before you introduce any musical or lyrical ideas.

The quick way to do this is to start with a song that you like, and set out to write a new song in the same tempo and with the same musical structure. You might even record a drum track first, in order to have the structure solidly in place.

Then pick some chord progressions and see if any musical ideas or lyrics suggest themselves to fill up the empty space of your song.

This method may require some patience. You can't force ideas to come, but if you sit with the rhythms and chords, things will soon start to fall into place. Don't worry if the song remains incomplete, because you can come back to it again and again over a period of days or weeks. New ideas will inevitably show up and find their places in the framework that you have created.

Before you know it, you'll have a complete song, one that grew naturally and organically in your own musical space. You may find that it's surprisingly fresh!

3♦ Update a folk song

2010-09-01T20:51:00.001-04:00

3♦ Three of Diamonds in The Rock Songwriter’s Deck: 52 Ways to Write a Song

The Three of Diamonds asks you to find a public-domain folk song and update the words and music. But the resulting song doesn't have to be in a folk-rock musical style! You get extra points if listeners can't tell that a folk song was your starting point.

Modernize the rhythms, the vocabulary, and the structure of the song, and dress it up in the garb of your favorite current musical style.

Reintroducing the Rock Songwriter's Deck

2010-08-31T19:40:00.003-04:00

A year ago this blog introduced The Rock Songwriter's Deck: 52 Ways to Write a Song.

There are many different ways to write a song, and trying different approaches is the fastest way to get fresher and more interesting results from your songwriting process. The Deck isn't a catalog; it's a cookbook. Try some of the recipes that we've posted thus far, and you will at least challenge your creative skills and learn something about your unique creative source.

We have eleven cards left to deal out in this weekly series, and it will resume tomorrow with the Three of Diamonds.

Inspiration is perishable

2010-08-30T16:56:00.000-04:00

Inspiration is like fresh produce. It's best if you get to it as soon as possible. If you put it aside for three days, it might not be worth anything by the time you get back to it.

If your schedule is perpetually jammed, so that you never have time to follow up on inspiration, you're missing out on the best things in your life. Working hard all the time will not make you successful, but inspiration will. Make room in your life for it. And when it shows up, be ready.

"Inspiration is a now thing. If it grabs you, grab it right back and put it to work." — Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, Rework.

Collect things that inspire you

2010-08-29T18:30:00.000-04:00

Often, one inspiration leads to another one. If you want a life full of inspiration, you can start with any inspirations you have, no matter how small they are.

One thing that's easy to do is to collect things that inspire you, that is, things that help you feel a positive sense of hope and possibility. These might be quotations, pictures, and examples of creative works that you admire and want to imitate.

If you fill your visual environment with things that inspire you, and hide away all the things that don't inspire you, you'll be living in a more inspiring world. This will not just make you feel better about things; you'll also have more brilliant new ideas.

Some of us were taught to be rationalistic and pragmatic about functional things. Take pencils, for example. It doesn't matter what color a pencil is on the outside, as long as it has black graphite on the inside. But style can be just as important as function, in the world of inspiration. If yellow pencils make you feel like you're in some dreary elementary school, and if metallic red pencils make you feel more alive, then you can afford to throw out your yellow pencils and buy some shiny pencils that will inspire you.

A team with a dream

2010-08-28T17:07:00.003-04:00

Inspiration is usually something that a single person carries. It's hard to explain the substance of an inspiration to someone else so that they can truly share it. At best, if you have a proven track record of successful inspirations, you might find that people will to follow your lead even though they can't exactly see where you're going.

But there are rare cases when a team of people share an inspiration and work together on it. If you are in such a team, don't take it for granted. These teams don't come together very often and usually don't last very long. Working together on an inspiration puts a lot of extra tension on relationships. Even with good people who have the best of intentions, it may take a lot of care and diplomacy to keep the team together and keep the project on track. If your team blows up and the project falls apart, try not to judge your teammates too harshly.

On the other hand, if you have a team that works together smoothly and handles ups and downs over a period of years, you have a powerful advantage in the world. Keep that team together!

Addicted to inspiration?

2010-08-27T16:53:00.006-04:00

Inspiration is a natural high. I like to say that inspiration is "safe and effective if you use it as directed for its intended purpose," as an occasional performance enhancement for creative work. As a drug-like experience, inspiration is naturally self-limiting. It remains unpredictable and beyond your control.

But some people manage to gain some control over their inspiration and use it to get intense highs regularly. Used this way, inspiration is a dangerous drug, and it can lead into a self-destructive spiral.

It's sobering to look at "Are you an addict?" questionnaires and see how many addictive behaviors apply to artists in the throes of their work. A big creative project can knock your life out of balance, and it's good to bring those phases to a close as soon as you can and take the time to re-balance your personal life. Don't go straight from one huge project to the next.

If you find yourself saying "I couldn't live without my creative work," but your "work" occurs only during episodes of intense inspiration, then your creative life is in a very unhealthy state.
The best way to keep it clean: Be committed to your art through the highs and lows, not just through the highs. For example, work on your art (at least a little bit) every day, whether you feel inspired or not.

Inspiration beats "design by committee"

2010-08-26T16:52:00.003-04:00

In every area of human activity, the best new things are created by individuals and small groups of people guided by inspiration. And most of the other less-exciting new things are created by larger groups of people through a systematic design process, driven by perfectly reasonable values and methods, such as logic, analysis, market research, and consensus.

Its intentions are good. Its processes are perfectly reasonable. Requirements are gathered, standards are defined, plans are put in place, and quality is checked and controlled.

There's no rational explanation for why systematic design performs so poorly by comparison to inspiration. You might even say it's an indictment of rationality itself. With such a thoroughly systematic process, it's hard to imagine how failure is even a possibility.

For whatever reason, systematic design, even when bolstered by enormous budgets and other structural advantages, struggles to create anything new of real value. It continues to be embarrassed by the better results of inspired newcomers, outsiders who often don't even seem to know what they are doing, but who come up with something better nonetheless.

Maybe inspiration itself is biased against Goliath and loves a spunky underdog. Maybe the irrational, unpredictable nature of inspiration leaves no place for it in an established, successful, mainstream enterprise.

Whatever the explanation, you should know this: If you're in touch with inspiration, you have a strategic competitive advantage. The most powerful people in the world are afraid of you. Even if you seem to face long odds, don't sell yourself short. Real inspiration is rarer than you think. Make the most of it.

The world wants to help you

2010-08-25T16:51:00.002-04:00

In yesterday's post, I explained why you don't need to be paranoid about your inspirations. In fact, the truth is approximately the opposite: If people know that you are driven by inspiration to accomplish a specific goal, many of them will feel inspired to help you.

It's not so much that they like and support your goal. It's really just that people like to see someone who is genuinely inspired about something.

It's similar to the way people like to see that someone is genuinely in love. There is something uplifting about being in the vicinity of someone who is in love or in the throes of inspiration — even if they feel that you are naive and unlikely to succeed. They love to see that you haven't given up on something that's important to you.

If you can make it clear to people what you hope to accomplish, and if they can see that you are sincerely driven by inspiration, and not trying to sell them something or trick them, people will do surprising things to help you accomplish your goal. Even if they don't understand why your goal is important to you, or even if they disagree with it, people will be moved by your sincere efforts and will do what they can to help you succeed.

So if your inspiration seems impossibly big, ask yourself what kind of help might bring it back into the realm of possibility. There is a whole world, jaded by manipulation and fakery, that still wants to believe in magic and love and authentic inspiration.

Don't get paranoid about your idea

2010-08-24T16:49:00.002-04:00

People who are struck by inspiration sometimes become secretive and paranoid. They think that people everywhere are trying to steal their great idea.

In practice, there is no shortage of ideas in the world, and remember this: only you can see the gleaming halo that surrounds your specific idea.

Even if you wanted to give your idea away, it's not a sure thing that anyone else would see the value in it.

It's a good idea to keep your inspirations private anyway, as I explained yesterday. But unless your previous ideas have consistently made hundreds of millions of dollars, it's not likely that spies are hiding in the ductwork trying to nab your new idea.

Inspiration is a personal thing

2010-08-23T16:48:00.003-04:00

When you are inspired by an exciting new idea, don't be surprised if other people don't get it. You might explain your new idea in detail to your family and friends, and feel puzzled and disappointed that they don't share your enthusiasm. At best, they might humor you or offer a general expression of support.

The fact is, they don't see what you see. Inspiration is a vision of a possibility, and it's rare when you can explain the possibility to others and get them to share your excitement.

Artists are generally advised to keep the details of their exciting inspirations private, at least during the early stages of a project. It's discouraging enough that people won't understand what you find so exciting about an idea. But there are some people who will actively try to undermine your self-confidence and convince you to give up on your idea and abandon your project. These might be people who resent the amount of time that you devote to your creative life, or people who envy the level of vitality and enthusiasm that your artistic pursuits bring you.

In particular, people who once were artists themselves, and who had their personal dreams crushed, will feel an urge to crush your enthusiasms in turn.

Don't give them the chance to pour cold water on your ideas. Keep your inspirations private, or share them only with people that you know you can trust.

When your idea is fully formed, then you can go ahead and show it to other people to get their reaction. Then, people will have a chance to see what you saw — because you can actually show it to them. They still could love it or hate it, but at least they'll be reacting to your creation, not reacting to their preconceptions of you as an artist.

Where to find inspiration

2010-08-22T17:55:00.002-04:00

Where do you find inspiration? This is one of the most-asked questions about inspiration, and if you've been following this blog, you probably realize by now that it's not even the right question to ask.

First, you don't find inspiration. Inspiration finds you.

Second, it's not about what place you're in, or what you're looking at. Inspiration is not an object that you discover. Inspiration is a way of seeing — a way of seeing what's not there but should be there. Inspiration is a state of mind, a willingness to discover something new that doesn't exist yet, but could exist in the future through your own creative actions.

If you have that state of mind, it doesn't matter where you are. You can find inspiration anywhere.

How to cultivate inspiration

2010-08-21T18:22:00.002-04:00

One of the themes of this month is that inspiration is capricious and uncontrollable. But this doesn't mean that you have no power at all over inspiration. In fact, new inspirations tend to be closely related to things that you've been paying close attention to, things that you've been studying intently, and things that are very important to you.

If you want inspiration to help you out in any particular area, then the thing to do is saturate your mind with information and unanswered questions from that area. Work with it, study it, struggle with it, write about it, dream about it.

There's no guarantee of how long you'll wait for inspiration and what exact form it will take, but it will eventually show up.

Inspiration is irrational

2010-08-20T16:47:00.001-04:00

Inspiration was involved in creating some of the best things ever created. But there are many examples to show us that the value of these things was not appreciated at the time of their creation, except by the person involved in creating them, a person possessed by inspiration.

When inspiration tells you to create something, there usually is no good logical explanation for the value of what you're creating — or, if there is, it's just that you're a good salesman, and you've made a convincing rationalization for the value of your work-in-progress.

And not all inspired works turn out to be big hits. Not all of them find a place in history books. As the creative artist seized by inspiration, you have no way of knowing if your work will be valuable or not. Inspiration undermined your objective judgment. And there's no one else who can tell you, because no one else fully understands the vision that you see. There simply is no rational way to tell whether you're on a fool's errand or creating a timeless masterpiece.

If people say you're crazy, and that your work is misguided, there's no way to prove them wrong. The best you can do is complete your work, and hope that other people recognize it as something uniquely valuable.

This great level of uncertainty is one of the things that makes the creative life feel stressful and lonely. At times like these, it's good to be connected with a community of artists who understand what it's like to be driven by inspiration, and who can offer encouragement and support.

Inspiration is specific

2010-08-19T16:47:00.003-04:00

Inspiration is very particular — not about everything, but about some specific detail. Even if you can't put into words what an inspiration is looking for, you definitely know whether you've gotten it right or not.

This sense of clarity is one of the things that makes inspiration so valuable to creative artists. Creating something new involves stepping into a daunting realm of infinite possibilities. With so many options, how do you decide what to create? Inspiration narrows the field of possibilities. By insisting on some specifics and making those items the centerpiece of the project, inspiration makes the artist's decision-making process more manageable.

I've repeatedly compared inspiration to love, and the comparison holds here as well. When you fall in love, it's with one specific person. Everything about that person is exalted, and there's no point in asking you to consider some other person instead. Perhaps inspiration could be described as "falling in love with something that doesn't even exist yet."

Stay on this road

2010-08-18T18:43:00.004-04:00

Inspiration is kind of like a temperamental friend. If you ignore inspiration, it feels neglected and wanders away. But if you grab onto it too earnestly, you might make it uncomfortable and drive it away.

With practice you can find a middle ground, appropriately engaged with inspiration. You can stay close without stepping on it.

With a little practice, you'll see that this is not a desperate balancing act, not at all like walking a tightrope. It's more like staying on a road while you're driving. You're not crashing through the guardrail on the right, nor are you tumbling into the ditch on the left. It's really not hard, as long as you just pay a little bit of attention and keep your hands on the steering wheel.

You can learn to roll with inspiration for mile after mile. It's a great way to travel!

The missing key to success

2010-08-17T18:11:00.000-04:00

Book after book tells you how to be successful. First you get a clear idea of what your goal is. Then you get a mental picture of the goal. You see as if it's already complete, in vivid detail, and with an emotional tone of excitement. Then you muster a state of confidence, brush aside all distractions, and work relentlessly until your goal is achieved.

This advice is somewhat accurate, but it's completely unhelpful! These success authors have gotten things completely backwards! What they're describing is a state of inspiration. People who act from inspiration are more confident and more effective than other people. They have clear goals, they get more done with less effort, and naturally they are more successful in life.

This misguided success formula comes from authors who have carefully studied the most successful people they can find. It's no surprise that the most successful people are all driven by inspiration. But it doesn't help you at all to have a success plan that begins, "Step 1: be inspired." You can't willfully enter a state of inspiration — or if you could, you would already be very busy and successful, and you wouldn't be reading a self-help book!

If you've heard this success formula before and tried unsuccessfully to follow it, don't feel bad. No one can! But there is something you can do: Learn to recognize when inspiration is at hand, and make the most of it every time, for as long as it lasts.

Don't wait for inspiration

2010-08-16T18:55:00.000-04:00

You don't get to pick what inspires you. Inspiration is rarely interested in the things that you feel you have to do. It's always something else, something that's not on your list.

If you find yourself just killing time, waiting for inspiration to join you so you can get started, you might as well give up. Inspiration never shows up when you're specifically looking for it. It's like the watched pot that never boils.

But if you just go ahead and start working on the things you have to do, you might find inspiration quietly joining you. It just sneaks in while you're not looking.

So don't wait for inspiration. For all you know, inspiration might be waiting for you.

Inside every impossible dream...

2010-08-15T16:56:00.003-04:00

Exciting new inspirations sometimes present themselves in forms that are literally impossible.

You don't have to set out to do the impossible, and you don't have to reject the inspiration either. Have faith that every inspiration comes to you for a good reason.

You must just have to tell that inspiration to stop playing games with you and take off its disguise. Or you might have to take a hammer and crack open its shell. If you stick with it, you'll find that inside every impossible dream is a worthwhile — and workable — goal.

Write it down

2010-08-14T16:48:00.001-04:00

When a brilliant new idea hits you, it's so clear, vivid, and powerful that you can't believe that you will ever forget it.

One day later, you might be scratching your head, saying, "I remember I had a great idea... but what was it?"

Memory is fickle, and this is especially true when you're dealing with different states of consciousness such as the expanded consciousness that accompanies inspiration. Get your idea written down, sketched, recorded, as soon as possible, in as much detail as you can manage.

It's still possible that you'll look at your notes a day later and say "I don't even remember why I thought this was such a great idea." But if the idea passes the 24-hour test, and still looks worthwhile the next day, you'll be glad you took the trouble to capture those details while they were fresh in your mind.

Planning in layers

2010-08-13T18:14:00.008-04:00

How can you plan a project when inspiration plays a key role in it? Inspiration is famously fickle; it could vanish without warning at any point.

Usually a project starts strong, and it's tempting to plan that you'll simply keep going with the same amount of momentum. For example, "I wrote 2000 words today! I'll just keep that up every day, and I'll have a first draft of my novel by the end of the summer!" That's an optimistic plan, not a realistic plan.

But don't be hard on yourself if this optimistic-planning pitfall snags you. Blame the nature of inspiration: it distorts our judgment and makes us unrealistically optimistic.

It's better to plan pessimistically, and always allow for the possibility that your progress will drag to a halt along the way.

If you must make a plan, keep your focus on short timeframes, prioritize ruthlessly, and be as flexible as possible about the size of the project.

Plan every week (or every day) as if it could be the end of the project, and always look for things that you can bring to completion. It's better if you have something potentially usable if you decide to pull the plug on the project.

For example, suppose you are struck by an idea for a 24-song album, one song for every major and minor key, linking each of the keys to one of the 24 hours in a day. It's a pretty cool concept, but the fact that it's tied to a specific level of effort should make you cautious from the start. If you decide to go ahead with this ambitious project, you should plan for the likely possibility that you won't finish it.

Don't start your 24-song album by recording 24 drum tracks, because if the project ends at that point, you don't have anything to show for your work. Instead, start by recording all the tracks for "Midnight." Then, if the project ends, you at least have one finished song that could be reused in some other project.

The worst trouble you can get into is to make a commitment with a deadline, a commitment that depends on inspiration helping you out. Unfortunately, some of us can't seem to get anything finished without a deadline. But is anything really worth worth the stress of facing a deadline under that much uncertainty? It's so much simpler if you get the critical inspiration-dependent work done first, and have only routine cleanup left to do before you set a deadline.

Getting carried away

2010-08-12T18:44:00.006-04:00

Does this ever happen to you?

You get an exciting idea for a new song. And by the end of the evening, the idea has somehow gotten bigger. It now encompasses an entire album and a thematically linked concert tour. And a series of T-shirts. And an interactive web site.

This kind of thing can happen with hot new ideas. They grow rapidly as they collect new possibilities. We call this process "getting carried away." It's almost as though the idea has abducted you and taken you away from your life. Now you've forgetten every plan you had yesterday, and your entire future is filled up with bigger and bigger versions of this exciting idea.
It's okay to get excited about your new ideas. There's nothing wrong with thinking through all the different formats that the idea could take, and writing down every potential followup that you can think of. It's always good to gather ideas and become aware of new possibilities. If this song turns out to be a hit, you'll have plenty of ideas to draw on for how to follow it up.

But you have to take this process lightly. Remember that a rapid rise is usually followed by a rapid fall, and the new idea might not look as bright and shiny tomorrow. A rule of thumb is, don't go registering any domain names until the next day. Don't start buying supplies and signing up for training classes while the idea is in its initial flush of excitement.

Capture your ideas, but try to get yourself out of the realm of planning and into the realm of action as quickly as you can. In other words, if you find yourself writing character sketches for the fourth book in the series, put those notes aside and actually start writing chapter 1 of the first book.

Under the influence of inspiration, plans have a way of getting bigger and bigger. But always remember, as we discussed yesterday, that inspiration also has a way of disappearing before its project is finished. So, after you "think big," try hard to "plan small." Keep your plans, projects, and commitments as small as you can manage.

Start with questions like these: What's the smaller and simpler way to follow through on this idea? What is the low-budget version of this project? How can I get this done with less time and effort? If I had limit this initiative to what I can actually get done today, is there anything of value that I could create by the end of the day?

For example, maybe the book you just dreamed up could be boiled down to a single blog post. Maybe instead of hiring an orchestra for your new piece of music, you can use synthesizers. Maybe instead of traveling the country to speak about your new insight, you can post an online video.

It's exciting to have big goals and to attach yourself to big ambitions. It's not so exciting when you're bogged down in an enormous project that seems impossible to finish.

When inspiration is leading a project, see if you can plan your work in layers, starting small but with room to grow. I'll have more on this strategy tomorrow.

When inspiration runs out before the project is finished

2010-08-11T18:42:00.004-04:00

So you were struck by inspiration, and you ran with it. Now your brilliant vampires-vs.-space aliens novel is half finished. Or you've wrapped up Act One of your clever computer-enhanced stage musical.

And then one day you sit down to work and find that your inspiration has vanished. Nothing you write seems good anymore. You can't even clearly remember why you thought this project seemed like such a great idea.

Inspiration has run out on you. It was there for a while, helping you get a huge amount of work done, but then it abruptly got bored and left. And now you're expected to finish this big project all by yourself?
Unfortunately, my experience has been that this always happens. Inspiration abandons you, or at least its brightness dims as the weeks go by. Inspiration will never carry you all the way through a big project. So what do you do when you find yourself left holding the bag?

You could just abandon the project. Don't be ashamed of admitting that a creative project failed. But if four big projects in a row fail in exactly the same way, then you really ought to try a different strategy.

You might be able to take some of the pieces you've completed and see what you can salvage for another purpose. Maybe you can turn your unfinished stage musical into a concept album. Maybe a big chunk of your novel can be reshaped into a short story.

You can take the professional approach (as discussed in yesterday's blog post) and just press ahead and finish the job. If you've already sold your project, you have no other choice. You can take heart in knowing that, even if your work isn't as good as you'd hoped, it's probably not as bad as it seems right now. But if you have to do this all the time, pushing things to completion without inspiration, your creative life will be a dreary experience. You might find yourself thinking, "I should have kept that retail job! It was more fun than this, and it paid better too!"

If the work you've done so far is good and you feel particularly stuck, you can hire a seasoned professional to help you get the work done. If there's a lot of money at stake -- if the theater is already rented and rehearsals start in two weeks -- this is the only responsible thing to do. Of course, it's tough on your ego to admit that you needed to bring in someone else to rescue your own creative project.

But the real long-term solution is to avoid getting caught in this situation in the first place. That is, plan your projects strategically, knowing that inspiration could abandon you at any point. I'll discuss this further tomorrow.

If you can't create without inspiration, then you have no control over your creative life

2010-08-10T18:40:00.003-04:00

Imagine you're in a funk-rock band whose drummer often fails to show up for rehearsals and gigs. That would be an intolerable situation, because all the bands' efforts come to nothing if the drummer isn't there to perform.

Though it might be painful for the band to admit it, you'd actually be better off rehearsing and performing without the drummer. Sadly, that probably means doing a different, less propulsive style of music. In the music world, professional doesn't mean "louder and flashier," it means that you showed up on time and did what you said you were going to do.

In much the same way, if your creative work depends on inspiration showing up, you're in trouble. Inspiration is not a reliable partner. Sure, you've done some amazing things when inspiration showed up, but you should also have some way to work even when inspiration is nowhere to be found.

It's easier to do this if you don't try to compete with your own best work. Just aim to create something simple that convincingly fills its space. As a songwriter, you can always put stock chord progressions together with standard beats and craft some competent rhyming couplets. You can tinker with the results and patch up any weak spots. And if the song still fails, you can throw it out and start over as many times as you need to.

You don't need inspiration to practice your songwriting craft. Sure, your results will be more modest and the work will move more slowly without the help of inspiration. It doesn't mean you've failed as an artist. It means that you're a professional, and you're showing up and doing the gig no matter what.

It's like getting a bribe

2010-08-09T18:50:00.000-04:00

Supposedly, in bygone days, record company men gave disk jockeys sacks full of cash along with their new released records. It was a simple request: free up some air time so you can play our new song on the radio. You could play some other song and get nothing out of it, or you can play our song and get a big bag full of cash.

Inspiration approaches you just like that record company man. It says, "You're a creative artist, and I need something created. Whatever you were planning to do today, just put that aside and create my thing instead."

Inspiration won't pay you in cash, but it has some pretty powerful leverage: a direct line to your brain's pleasure center. It's a deal that few can refuse.

What is the formula for genuine inspiration?

2010-08-08T16:29:00.003-04:00

The food companies have heard about a growing segment of consumers who prefer the honest flavor of real food. Somewhere, a flavoring department is being asked to recreate that "honest, real food" flavor so the company can mass-manufacture "real-food style products" with cheaper ingredients.

In other industries, they're trying to reverse-engineer and isolate genuine inspiration so it can be automatically included as a feature of their new products.

Of course, there is no formula for inspiration, just as there is no "real food" flavor essence that comes in a bottle. But that won't stop them from trying. Just watch.

Crazy

2010-08-07T16:19:00.003-04:00

One description of inspiration is "believing in something that doesn't yet exist." This, unfortunately, is very close to one definition of crazy.

Is it crazy to put so much energy into an unproven, never-before-seen possibility? Sure, sometimes it is — but the world would be a much poorer place if everyone ignored their inspirations in favor of being fully grounded in reality.

Inspiration does not bend to your will

2010-08-06T18:31:00.003-04:00

Inspiration will come along and tell you what to do. You can say yes or no — but don't even bother trying to haggle with it.

Suppose you are struck with a terrific idea for a song about rabbits entering a dance competition. You might be tempted to say, "That's great! Thanks for inspiring me! But I'm trying to write songs for my very serious death metal band, so let's just change 'dancing rabbits' to 'marauding werewolves.'"

You've tried this. You know it doesn't work. Inspiration's energy quickly evaporates if you try to redirect it to some other purpose. Inspiration doesn't care about your practical needs. It doesn't understand the importance of advancing your creative career -- even though your career success will actually make you better able to serve the whims of inspiration. Frankly, inspiration is selfish and short-sighted and not a team player!

But there's no point in complaining, and you're not going to be able to change the way inspiration works. So just take the few minutes to write down the idea for the dancing rabbit song, and then set it aside and get back to the very serious songwriting that you need to do.

If you make inspiration feel welcome, it will visit you more often

2010-08-05T18:29:00.004-04:00

All of us dream every night, even though most of us remember our dreams only occasionally, and some people never remember any of their dreams. Similarly, inspiration is potentially available to all of us every day, but most of us remain uninspired most of the time.

There is a well-established technique for remembering more of your dreams. If you pay attention to your dreams, treat them as something important, and write down the dreams you remember, you will soon remember more dreams in more vivid detail. Even people who don't remember their dreams can get this process started by starting a dream journal and writing down any fleeting images or emotional tones that they wake up with, just on the chance that those impressions might be from a dream.

Just by paying attention to your dreams and treating them as important, you can quickly increase the number of dreams you remember.

If you want to have more inspiration in your life, one way to do it is to keep an inspiration journal. Make note of anything that even vaguely smells like inspiration. Write down ideas that tickle your fancy. Record any thoughts that start with "Wouldn't it be cool if..."

It's important to understand that writing down an idea is not a commitment to follow through on it. There will always be too many ideas and too little time. And it's just as important not to send away any inspiration just because it isn't practical.

For example, if after seeing the movie "Up" you think "Wouldn't it be cool if a rock band's tour bus were carried from city to city by helium balloons?" don't dismiss that thought because the engineering is impractical and your band isn't ready to tour anyway. You don't have to invent a new flying machine -- just acknowledge the inspiration in some way, perhaps by drawing a little sketch of the flying bus in your journal.

If you accept and acknowledge every bit of inspiration that comes your way, you will soon be visited by more inspirations, bigger and better ones, and some of them will be practical ideas that help solve your specific problems.

Inspiration makes you a genius

2010-08-04T18:03:00.002-04:00

Inspiration doesn't just waltz through the door and hand you a shiny new idea. It also makes you smarter, quicker, better motivated, and more talented. (And, very likely, sexier!)

By giving you a clear and specific goal to focus on, inspiration clears away the thicket of indecision that often bogs down down creative work. It also puts you into a different state of consciousness, a thinking style with a slower pace and broader base. This enables you to take in more information, keep track of more details, and tackle complex, multi-dimensional problems with ease.

How does inspiration do this? Mainly by shoving aside all other worries and concerns that might occupy your thoughts. Inspiration also helps clear your schedule, by reducing the urgency of other activities (like eating and sleeping, for example).

With a singular focus, enhanced self-confidence, extra brainpower, and long hours of uninterrupted work, it's no wonder that you get top-quality results under the influence of inspiration.

Ask the jukebox to explain inspiration

2010-08-03T18:28:00.004-04:00

When you try to understand the relatively uncommon, often misunderstood experience of inspiration, your best reference point is the nearly universal, well-explored experience of love.

Since roughly half of all rock songs are about love, our universal jukebox has collected a great deal of wisdom on the subject. When you have a question about inspiration, for example, "Why is it so hard to find inspiration?" just change the word "inspiration" to "love": "Why is it so hard to find love?" Then you're ready to take your question to the jukebox. When an answer emerges, just translate the word "love" back to "inspiration."

This jukebox trick won't necessarily give you a clear answer to your question, but you'll at least get a clearer idea of what the question means.

Perhaps you've been "looking for inspiration/ in all the wrong places." We all know "inspiration takes time/ and it's hard to find." Maybe searching is pointless, and the best you can do is be prepared for when "inspiration comes walking in."

Inspiration vs. "perspiration"

2010-08-02T18:05:00.001-04:00

"Writing is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration," my first writing teacher told me.

It's a catchy slogan. It even rhymes! Never mind that writing doesn't require enough physical effort to actually break into a sweat. Never mind the exact numbers; I've heard other people cite the key ratio as 5%/95% and 1%/99%.

There is an important message at the heart of this slogan: creative work is a form of work. If you want to create something, to accomplish something, you have to be willing to do some work. It brings to mind another slogan, one that also happens to rhyme: "No pain, no gain."

Yes, creative work involves work. When we put it that way, it seems obviously true; how could anyone ever imagine it to be otherwise? But people do.

The thing is, "I want to be a writer!" (or songwriter, artist, whatever) is usually prompted by early experiences with inspiration. Somehow, something got created, with scarcely any effort involved. It was a magical and highly meaningful experience. Who wouldn't want a life filled with moments like that?

Writing teachers get impatient with students who haven't done their homework because they are "waiting for inspiration." And students are dismayed to find that they have to learn to write on cue, without any assistance from inspiration.

Alas, a creative career mostly involves hard work, and you don't get carried much of the way by inspiration. Indeed, we could dismiss inspiration entirely, as some kind of freakish psychological phenomenon, if it weren't for these facts:

Artists do their best work when following inspiration.
Most of the best things in the world are created by way of inspiration.
The results of inspired work seem to make life better for everybody.

Inspiration is not just a substitute for personal effort after all. Work is necessary, and inspiration is also necessary. And coordinating work and inspiration, making them dance gracefully together, is the way to produce your best creative output. This is a skill that, just as with any other skill, you can learn through practice.

This is the August of Inspiration

2010-08-01T18:41:00.000-04:00

Yes, August is the Month of Inspiration here at Unruly Beast! The whole month will be devoted to poking around at this mysterious subject.

Inspiration is a critical part of life for many creative artists, but it's not an easy subject to talk about. We can catalog all the chords you'll ever use in rocks songs, and define the chords' functions and relationships — but when it comes to inspiration, there are no diagrams, no tables, no clear-cut answers. Inspiration is one of those big, fuzzy subjects, like God and Love and the Meaning of Life.

What is inspiration, exactly? It's not even easy to define. Sometimes inspiration takes the form of an idea. It pops into your head, it leaps off the paper while you're writing, or it jumps up and down in front of your face as a sudden answer to a question that you might or might not have been asking.

In whatever way it makes its appearance, inspiration is more than just an idea. It's possible to fill pages with new ideas and not come across any inspiration. If inspiration is an idea, it's an idea that comes attached to a payload. This is an idea that enters with force and momentum and certainty. It imposes itself and demands to be expressed.

Inspiration sometimes appears as a vision. You suddenly see a complete and detailed mental picture of something. It's something that doesn't yet exist, but the vision somehow compels you to bring it into existence.

Following through on an inspiration can be exhilarating. Artists often describe these moments as the most profound and meaningful experiences in their lives. But inspiration can just as easily lead to frustration, heartbreak, and despair. If you catch a vision of a great possibility, but don't have the right skills and techniques to bring it to reality, the failure hurts. Failed artists are suicide risks in just the same way as scorned lovers. This is powerful stuff. If it were a product, the FDA would have to consider pulling it off the market.

Love makes fools of us all, it is said. Falling in love is almost a universal experience, and its foolish results decorate our literature, movies, and newspapers. Inspiration makes fools of just some of us, while most others seem to be immune to its particular indignity. Because it's a less-common experience, an artist grappling with inspiration's irrational nature can sometimes feel very alone. This is why it's good for artist to be in touch with other artists, to have a support network of others who understand the emotions and challenges that come with creative work.

Of course, inspiration comes in many sizes, shapes, and flavors, and it's not always an epic life-shaking experience. You can learn to cultivate inspiration, to make it a bigger presence in your life and your work, and to handle it successfully without getting burned. That's the subject of August of Inspiration here at Unruly Beast.

A note from your unruly blogger

2010-07-31T18:13:00.000-04:00

Thanks for sticking around and reading my Unruly Beast of a Songblog! When I launched this blog, I optimistically imagined that it would only take a year or two to share everything I knew about rock songwriting. It's been almost a year now, and we've barely scratched the surface. There is so much to say, and so little time to spare for blogging between all of my other activities.

I still plan to cover melody, song structure, lyrics, the creative process, and a whole host of techniques for coming up with ideas and systematically building a song. I'm considering doing at least some of that material in audio or video format. Sometimes listening to a musical example is better than reading a thousand words.

For the immediate future, August is going to be the Month of Inspiration. I suspect that some of you will find August's posts powerful and eye-opening. Others might find that it has no connection to the practical musical techniques that you're hoping to learn about. If you're in the latter group, that's fine. You can sit this one out, but please come back in September for a new season of songwriting techniques. But if you're one of those artists whose work revolves around that mysterious, unreliable, aggravating, and uniquely rewarding phenomenon called inspiration, please stay tuned.

Q♥ Key to your heart

2010-07-28T20:50:00.000-04:00

Q♥ Queen of Hearts in The Rock Songwriter’s Deck: 52 Ways to Write a Song

The Queen of Hearts invites you to fall deeply in love and write an honest and authentic love song.

If you're not in love with someone right now, you don't have to fake it. There's another way to play the Queen's game: by taking inventory of the most powerful desires that tug at your heart, and writing a song about one of them.

You must be honest if you want to win at this game. Don't pretend your #1 wish is world peace if what truly moves your heart is the thought of having a #1 hit, or of driving a particular car. The Queen of Hearts is also a lover of luxury. She will sympathize with your most worldly and materialistic desires.

Write earnestly, as though your song will — if you find just the right notes and words — win your beloved’s affection or lead the way to the exact thing you desire. Make sure your song fully embodies your wish.

Who knows? There really is a Queen of Hearts. She is rather fond of songs and songwriters. Maybe she will be so touched by your song that she'll decide to pull some magical strings to make your wish come true.

But even if you don't get your wish exactly the way you imagine it, the Queen of Hearts guarantees that something magical will happen it if you put your full efforts into this song. Count on it — and write from your heart.

6♥ Song therapy

2010-07-21T20:50:00.000-04:00

6♥ Six of Hearts in The Rock Songwriter’s Deck: 52 Ways to Write a Song

Songwriting can heal your heart. The Six of Hearts invites you to stare your most painful memories right in the face — yes, those memories you are most inclined to shrink away from. You can use the creative alchemy of songwriting to transform your most troubling emotions into haunting beauty. This transformation process will free you from the chains of the past.

When you're done with the song, you might or might not want to release the resulting song to the public. If you decide that the song is too raw and personal to share, it's okay to keep it private. The healing is still yours to keep.

But your brutal honesty might strike a resonant chord with your audience, following a long tradition of deeply personal confessions that turned into big hits. Your might even help anonymous strangers heal their own emotional wounds through the musical magic of your own healing process.

To play this game, lay the Six of Hearts on the table, and then start with any emotion, any traumatic memory, anything that troubles you. Use your creative skills to explore that part of your psyche and express your deepest feelings. Your songwriting studio is a safe place. Don't hold back.

Open the door and let 'em in (Songwriting tips)

2010-07-19T20:04:00.000-04:00

While writing, write down the ideas that pop into your head — even the dumb ones.

If you say no to any idea, you run the risk of offending your muse, and then your flow of ideas will come to a dead stop. It takes only a moment to jot the idea in the margin or add it to your list of ideas.

Sometimes if you "unwrap" a bad idea there's a brilliant idea hiding underneath. If someone else comes by while you're working, they may happen to suggest a tiny change that turns your dumb idea into the perfect thing.

It's happened to me plenty of times, and I've begun to trust that any idea that shows up is there for a reason, even if its value isn't immediately obvious.

And that's a wrap for today (Songwriting tips)

2010-07-12T19:59:00.000-04:00

Know when to stop working. The creative process has a natural arc to it. Don't push on when inspiration is exhausted.

These are hints that it's time to stop writing: you feel irritable, indecisive, or lost. If you find yourself looking at the same thing for ten minutes without making progress, then it's probably time to quit and plan to come back another day with a fresh perspective.

Of course, putting your work aside isn't always an option. If you face a deadline and must keep going even when you feel creatively exhausted, it's time to lower your standards and find the simplest possible way to get to the finish line. That's when you should fall back on proven formulas, cheap gimmicks, and familiar cliches. Steal from your own previous work if you have to. Turn in something that's workable and usable. But don't struggle to come up with something fresh, new, and brilliant when that creative spark isn't there.