I am con­stantly jot­ting down lines on any scrap that I can get my hands on, receipts, envelopes, nap­kins. My pock­ets would be stuffed with gems, which I would invari­ably lose. To rem­edy the dis­si­pa­tion of my for­tune I invested in a cheap memo-pad. True I could have sprung for a mole­sk­ine. I’ve used them before and quite enjoy the pre­ten­sion, but I can’t really afford that vel­vety smooth pre­ten­sion right now. A cheap memo-pad is a frac­tion of the cost, and in the end, it’s not the paper you use that makes your words great.

I used to write out lyrics in a spi­ral bound note­book, or loose leaf in a binder. When faced with the giant expanse of a page, I used to start writ­ing, first verse, refrain, sec­ond verse, third and so on. It was all very orderly and very dif­fi­cult. If things didn’t fit, it was hard for me to rework them. Occa­sion­ally I would draw arrows to show that some pas­sages should be swapped, or I may have squeezed in a new line under­neath an old one. The fact that I had this one big space that would fill up with words leav­ing pre­cious lit­tle areas on the page for doing rewrites, cou­pled with the lack of abil­ity to eas­ily shift around blocks of text meant that often when the lyrics stopped work­ing, I’d throw the baby out with the bath­wa­ter.

What I’ve found now, is that com­pared to my days of loose-leaf, I’ve started using a very non-linear writ­ing process. Now lyrics come together like a patch­work quilt. That’s not to say that they are hap­haz­ardly strung together, it is still impor­tant to keep the big pic­ture of theme and nar­ra­tive in mind, but rather that the pieces of the lyri­cal whole are put in the places they belong. Reduc­ing my writ­ing area to a space that is 3 by 5 inches has given me great lat­i­tude in the con­struc­tion of a song. I can gen­er­ate many phrases know­ing that I’ll find a place for the ones that fit and eas­ily dis­card the ones that don’t. Even then, the dis­carded writ­ing may find a place in another work, with just a lit­tle alteration.

One more thing, it occurs to me to men­tion that there is a good rea­son not to splurge for the expen­sive note­books. I find that I’m more unwill­ing to sully an expen­sive note­book with bad writ­ing. This may sound like a good way to pro­voke good writ­ing, but all it does is paral­yse and dis­suade risk tak­ing. Good writ­ing doesn’t come about from some divine pen­stroke that has been fully planned before­hand. If one had to wait for only the really good stuff to bur­ble up before com­mit­ting any­thing to paper noth­ing would get done. Good writ­ing is the result of quan­tity minus the bad stuff. It’s more impor­tant to be a good edi­tor than an inspired writer.

Tags: Creativity, Lyrics, Songwriting, Writer's Block

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.