How to frame your new songs before you write them

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.

1. Count out 15 sheets of blank paper. (If you use them up, you can add more sheets later.)
   
2. 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.
3. 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:

• Write a new song that has the same good qualities as another song you like
• Write a song about a specific topic or a personal experience
• Write a song using an idea or fragment of content from your notebook

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

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

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

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.

The to-do list and hopelessness

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.

Planning in layers

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

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.