Here comes February Album Writing Month

It's time for February Album Writing Month 2013, at http://fawm.org. The FAWM challenge: to write 14 songs during the 28 days of February.

Writing quickly with a deadline is a great way to build your strength as a songwriter. If you never face a deadline, you you might be holding on to lazy, sloppy, inefficient writing habits.  It's like an athlete who works out but never plays a game or runs a race, or like an actor who practice lines and characters but never gets onstage.  Putting your feet to the fire forces you to do better.  That's why I recommend participating in FAWM to anyone who wants to become a better songwriter.

For the month of February, I'll be posting songwriting suggestions — ideas that you can take and build into a song for FAWM or for any other purpose.  Sometimes it's hard to get past the initial hurdle of deciding what to write about.  If you find yourself in that situation, check back here for  songwriting suggestions, and see one of them helps you get started a little faster on your next song.

Seed your creativity

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:

1. Pick a seed at random from any of these sources
2. 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
   
3. When the time is up, pick a different random seed and start the timer again.

Grabbing a handful of ideas

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.