When I sit down to write these days, I still feel a pang of nervousness. What if I can’t think of anything good? What if I just sit there and rehash old ideas? What if I travel down a dead-end, and spend hours rewriting until I have to scrap the whole thing? These can be paralyzing questions for writers if we rely on inspiration alone to fuel our songwriting.
When I am inspired and ideas flow, I am grateful. But what about when I’m not inspired, or I’m working towards a deadline? To jump-start a new song, I often spend 15 or 20 minutes doing a form of writing I call “Destination Writing.” It’s very similar to “Object Writing,” and involves stream of consciousness writing centered around 6 keys of connection: taste, touch, sight, sound, smell, and movement. These sense-bound ideas work to bring the experience I’m writing about to life. Instead of the listener standing on the outside of my experience, they are suddenly made a part of the experience. This form of writing is the foundation for two writing courses online, Pat Pattison’s “Tools and Strategies,” and my own course, “Commercial Songwriting Techniques.”
After I’ve written a page or two describing an event, a place, a person, or an object in sense-bound language, I can then lift out phrases and ideas from this writing to include in my lyric. I’m fully convinced that what makes a good song is not so much ‘what’ we write, but ‘how’ we write it. A song about love can be generic or utterly unique depending on our approach. The more specific my details and authentic my descriptions, the stronger the experience I create for my listener.
Destination writing done daily can keep us supplied with lots of song material whenever we feel a drought coming on. Another way I like to work up song material is to keep a notebook handy for title or theme ideas taken from movies, magazines, advertisements, or even everyday conversations. Many times simply becoming aware of the phrases people say in routine conversations can yield great titles and song ideas.
Finally, I like to have more than one song in the works at any given time. When I’ve got three or four ideas I’m writing, I can choose to start a new idea, or work on finishing one in progress. That way if a song isn’t turning out quite how I had hoped, I still have 3 others to give my energy towards. Feeling good about my progress and my productivity is important, and so I always make sure to give myself the opportunity to succeed.
Inspiration can come in spurts, and waiting for it to hit can leave us songwriters dry for weeks or even months at a time. Instead of relying on ideas falling from the sky, I try to coax them in with the tools and techniques I’ve learned to craft memorable songs. After all, ideas are neither good nor bad, and often it’s our ability to organize those ideas that determines the emotional investment from our listeners.
