Tip #14-1/2: Embrace your limitations

It seems paradoxical, but when artists are forced to work within severe limitations, it often leads to their best and most memorable works. Artists all know about this phenomenon, and so they often chase down self-imposed constraints, hoping to spur their creativity. For example, an entire album with only voice and ukulele.

When you're under the gun to produce a whole pile of work in a limited time, the deadline is itself a constraint that can spur your creativity. But there's another set of constraints that you should go ahead and adopt in such high-pressure circumstances: the constraints that correspond to your own personal limitations as an artist.

Instead of struggling to overcome your limitations, this is the time to embrace them. Instead of raging against the handicaps that keep you from reaching your goals, choose them as the constraints that define your style.

If you can't play fast to save your life, you can be the artist who does all slow-tempo songs.

Tip #14: Maybe it's complete already

Approaching the end of our series of 14-1/2 tips for writing quickly.

One of the secrets of artistic genius is knowing when to stop.

If you find yourself struggling to fill in the missing pieces of your song, it's time to think the unthinkable: maybe your song doesn't need that piece at all.

Trying playing through the song with just the pieces you have. Does it say what you need it to say? Does it fill its space effectively? If so, maybe you can stop writing and declare success. You might just happen to have a brilliantly enigmatic song with a daring and unconventional shape.

Tip #13: Roll dice

Continuing our series of tips for writing quickly.

If decisions slow you down, try taking yourself out of the decision process. Write down your list of options and roll a die or flip a coin to choose among them.

If you think you need to manage every detail and carefully consider every decision, you might be surprised at how well things work out if you loosen your control of the process and let random chance be your collaborator.

Tip #12: The buddy system

Continuing our series of tips for writing quickly.

Nothing spurs your creativity like having a buddy or group of friends to share your works-in-progress with. Whether you meet every week, or check in on Facebook every day, you'll be highly motivated to have something new to show your friends each time. Sometimes that extra motivation is all you need to get over your temporary hurdles and get your song done.

One of the great things about the setup of the FAWM challenge is how easily you can share your songs online as soon as you get them done. Even the possibility of an audience — someone might come along and listen to your song online — provides an extra motivation to get something done.

Tip #11: Set aside doubt and criticism

Continuing our series of tips for writing quickly.

Nothing slows down the creative process like self-doubt and internal criticism. If doubts and critical thoughts insist on intruding while you're trying to write, just temporarily set them aside.

If it helps, take a sheet of paper, and write at the top "Questions to think about on March 1" (or pick another appropriate date). Keep this paper physically nearby, but at the outside edge of your creative workspace. When a doubt pops into your head, take the time to write it down on the sheet of paper. And then set it aside and get back to writing.

These thoughts don't mean to be destructive. They have an appropriate role and place in your life, but their appropriate place is outside of your creative work.

Tip #10: Repetition, repetition, repetition

Continuing our series of tips for writing quickly.

What's the secret of writing catchy songs?
Repetition!
What makes a song easier for listeners to hear?
Repetition!
What makes a song quicker to write?
That's right — the answer is repetition!

Don't struggle to invent extra material just to fill up your song. Say what you need to say, and then find the best way to spread out that material over the space of the song. Look for ways to repeat and reuse words, phrases, riffs, chord lines, and hooks.

Tip #9: Collaborate

Continuing our series of tips for writing quickly.

If you're racing to meet this year's FAWM challenge (writing 14-1/2 songs by February 29), the single easiest way to get there faster is to collaborate with other writers. If two or three of you work together on a song, that song provides each of you a full credit towards your FAWM quota.

It's so much faster, it might even feel like cheating. But it's not cheating; it's a way of getting the job done.

In a real-world situation where you have a recording session scheduled and you need to write an album's worth of songs quickly, pulling in collaborators is the rational thing to do. No one will deduct any points if you're not the sole songwriter on your album — but they sure will hold it against you if you give them an album of songs that aren't up to snuff.

Of course, collaboration has other advantages besides getting work done faster. You also get the unique results of two creative minds working together.

Tip #8: Beat the clock

Continuing our series of tips for writing quickly.

An athlete finds every possible way to squeeze fractions of a second out of the sprint from point A to point B. An extra tenth of a second could easily be the margin of victory.

Ordinarily, songwriting has no deadlines, and as a result it's often a lazy and sluggish event. But you can bring some of the athlete's competitive spirit into your songwriting. Work with a stopwatch, an hourglass, or a timer, and decide that you're going to beat the clock. Can you write 4 lines of lyrics in 3 minutes? You make up your own challenge, and then start the clock.

If you challenge your limits, you'll not only write faster, but you'll also bring more muscular energy into your songs.

Tip #7: Write two or three songs in parallel

Continuing our series of tips for writing quickly.

If you're trying to write a whole pile of songs, you don't have to write them one at a time. Try writing two or three songs — ones that are similar in character or cover similar themes — at the same time. Leftover pieces from song #1 might find a perfect place in song #2, so you end up with fewer ideas thrown away.

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.

Tip #5: Follow an example

Continuing our series of tips for writing quickly.

Pick a good song that has the same tempo, length, and feel as the song you want to write. Then cut your example song into pieces, and replace each piece with an equivalent piece of your own creation. You'll end up with your own notes, lyrics, chords, and rhythms, in a song that's exactly the same shape as your example song.

How does the example song help if you write all new music and lyrics anyway? It helps by giving you a very precise to-do list, so none of your songwriting effort is wasted.

Tip #4: Work out of order

Continuing our series of tips for writing quickly.

It's often faster to write a song out of order. You don't have to write beginning to end, the way the audience listens to the song. You can write in any order that makes sense for your writing process. You can even start by writing random bits of stuff and plan to put them in order in a later stage of writing.

Tip #3: Think of three options

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

At every creative decision point, think of at least three options before you move forward. It might seem like a waste of time and effort to come up with multiple ideas when you only need one. But think of it as looking around at an intersection before choosing which way to go. A few seconds spent considering your options could save you several minutes of walking in the wrong direction.

Tip #2: Hold on loosely

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

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

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.

Get ready for FAWM: Set your expectations aside

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.

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!

2♣ Iron Songwriter

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

This week, the Two of Clubs invites you to put yourself under pressure by setting a time limit — maybe just one hour — and writing the best song you can manage to write in that brief period of time.

You'd think this arbitrary limitation would just be a handicap, like running a race while carrying a 20-pound weight. But give it a try! Sometimes forcing yourself to work quickly means that you have to give up all of your complicated ideas about how to write a song.

The bizarre truth is that simpler songs usually are more entertaining, easier to listen to, and more powerful. The real handicap is all of the preconceptions and complications that you bring to the table.

So set a stopwatch or alarm clock with a firm deadline, and force yourself to heed it.

For extra fun, you can stage this as a competition against another songwriter, following the example of TV's Iron Chef. Have a panel of friends give you two songwriters a specific assignment — a title, for example — and exactly one hour to write a song. After the hour is up, each songwriter plays his or her new song for the panel, and the panel picks a winner.

If you go to this trouble, you will certainly sweat! And you will risk the embarrassment of ending the hour with something malformed and incomplete. But you never know, until you try, what brilliance of yours might emerge under pressure. You might emerge victorious, and gain "the people's ovation, and fame forever."

3♣ Use up some ink and paper

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

When writing a song -- or creating anything -- we naturally want the results to be great. Why set out to create something average? But the pressure to produce great stuff is a burden on the creative process. It's hard to be inventive when you need guaranteed results. At worst, you might find that you can't write anything at all, for the fear that you might create something that isn't good enough.

The Three of Clubs gives us an antidote to perfectionism and writer's block. Start with several blank sheets of paper, and keep writing until you have filled them up! Your new goal isn't to create goodness, it's to end up with a page full of stuff -- new stuff that you just wrote.

At worst, you'll create something bad, and you can throw it out. But if you persist, you will eventually, without even trying, come up with a brilliantly fresh idea. Those ideas are hanging around, waiting to come out -- but they can only emerge if you're actually writing, and only while you're not paying full attention to what you're doing.

Paradoxically, it can be easier to write ten songs than it is to write one song. When you're writing one song, that song alone carries the weight of all your hopes and ambitions, and your writing gets bogged down. But if you're going to write ten songs, there's less pressure on each of them, and you can speed through the process.

Take on the Three of Clubs' challenge. Empty out your pen, and fill up the page with new songs. Are they good songs? It doesn't even matter! You can decide that later -- right now you're busy writing.