Tip #6: Stand up! Sit down!

Continuing our series of tips for writing quickly.

To keep from getting bogged down in the writing process, change your physical position and location frequently — at least every half hour. Stand up, sit down, walk around. Work at a desk or table, then work with your instrument, then work at your computer.

Different locations, different postures, and different writing tools each lend themselves to different patterns of thought. By moving around and changing things up, you give more parts of your brain a chance to participate in the writing process.

Of course you worry about what people will think

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.

"Yes I can" and "Yes it will"

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

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

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.

Aim for the target (not the clouds)

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

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!

When inspiration runs out before the project is finished

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.

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

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)

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.

Pass the wince test (Songwriting tips)

After you finish a song, you have to live with it. If something bugs you just a tiny bit now, will it make you cringe years from now, every time you hear the song?

I'm a songwriter with a long history, and when I listen to my earlier albums, I'm embarrassed at the songwriting flaws that I feel I could easily have avoided.

Of course, you can't afford to bring your creativity to a halt out of the fear that you'll create something that you might dislike later. What I recommend is listening just once with a self-conscious perspective. For example, pretend that your song has become a TV theme song, and it's heard again and again by millions of people.

In that imaginary context, is there one little flaw in your song that stands out, something that you'd like to fix? If there is, fix it now.

Start anywhere (Songwriting tips)

When writing a song, where do you start? Well, you can start with the lyrics, or with the music. You can start at the beginning of the first verse. You can start with the title, the hook, and the chorus. You can start at the end and work backwards.

Put simply, you can start anywhere. If you're stuck trying to think of a first line, then don't start with the first line. If you can't think of a hook, then don't start with the hook. Just skip over any place where you're stuck, and work somewhere else. Trust that everything will fall into place along the way.

Start with whatever you have already. Maybe it's an idea that you want people to think about. Maybe it's a fun little piece of wordplay. Maybe it's a chord progression that you like. Work with whatever inspiration prompted you to write, and build outward from there.

Keep it fresh (Songwriting tips)

For fresh musical ideas, shake up your writing habits. Use an instrument that's different from your usual. If you usually start with a chord progression, try writing the melody first. If you usually write in the evening in your studio, try writing in the afternoon in the park.

Tip: Write more, use less

Here's a secret known by every professional photographer. If you want to have consistently good results, don't take just one shot. In a magazine cover shoot, after everything is perfectly set up and in place, they still might take 100 photos, knowing perfectly well that they only need one and will end up throwing the other 99 away.

This strategy of excess applies to songwriting, too, even though it may be somehow more painful to write a song and then throw it away. A song is almost a living thing; how can you create it and then abandon it? But you'll want to get over those feelings and consider what a huge advantage you gain by a little bit of excess. You can love everything you write, but don't become attached to anything.

If you're recording an album, you never know which song might inexplicably fall apart in the studio. You could try again and again to record it a slightly different ways, and keep tinkering with it until you go over budget, tear your hair out, and lose your confidence in yourself as a musician — or you could just pull your next song out of the folder and say, "Maybe we'll have better luck with this one."

Better yet, for a 12-song album, plan ahead of time to write 30 songs, demo 24 of them, record 16, and release the 12 that come out the best. It's just easier to write more and abandon the ones that fail than it is to rescue the song that goes off track. And if music fans are going to devote money, time, and energy listening to your album, they shouldn't have to suffer through a dud. You shouldn't deliver a song that you feel iffy about.

Write more than you need, and use less than you write.

This applies within a song too. I often write four verses and end up cutting it back to about two-and-a-half verses. When writing funny songs I think of several clever jokes and puns about the song's subject matter, but I never use all of them. The wittiest bit of wordplay might fall the wayside because I just can't get it to fit the rhyme scheme.

While writing music, I often come up with three or four different ways to shape a melody. I eventually settle on the best one and throw the others away.

Fundamentally, it's faster and easier to create more and then prune than it is to create just enough and have to revise and reshape it. Make sure you can create new ideas and material easily and comfortably, and let it be just as easy to cut things out and chop away the parts that don't fit.

Thursday is Tip Day for the Unruly Beast.