A cure for writer's block!

[milfus]

oh nah, its not mandatory, its just about refining your skills really, you learn 30 times more writing 30 bad songs, then you do writing one good one, which is the theory, if you write enough bad songs, you eventually stop, and write sub par songs, and so on till you write mostly good songs with a few bad ones.

[cameron]

Sept 24, 2008, 12:34pm, milfus wrote:yeah i use the 30 bad ones rule, me and a friend where at a convention, and there was like 8 grammy winning songwriters on the stage giving speeches, and at the end, this one girl, bless her heart, asked "how can i write a good song" and two of them, at the same time, without even a pause, said "go home and write 30 bad ones." so from then on, we always joke about writing the 30 bad ones inbetween, but it really holds true.Oh goody, only six to go....Cam

[Mark Kaufman]

Sept 17, 2008, 9:11pm, hummingbird wrote: I've learned to let go, and just let things flow out of me without editing or worrying about final production, or even whether it's "good enough".That's the ticket, all right. If I worried about that stuff during the first steps of the creative process I would never finish a song.I like to say that the early stages of writing require a heavy dose of Yes...and save the No for the rewrites and final edits. It takes blind faith and acceptance to get something to work with...then and only then can you can start getting critical, otherwise you just keep vetoing a universe of possibilities.Here's another mini-cure for writer's block... Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies Webpage

[milfus]

yeah thats a really good point too,it goes, writing-editing-re-writing(editing-re-writing as needed)but you have to keep the steps seperate, same with mixing

[anne]

Great thread -

[georginasaint]

Hey Adrianne and everybody on this inspiring thread! Three days ago I decided to write 4 instrumentals in one day and came out with three usable ones out of that. 2 of them already submitted to a listing! Normally I write about one a week. I thought that was being ambitious - I would have laughed at the idea of writing 20, but maybe I'll try that over the weekend. When I lived in NYC I went to a songwriting course at BMI and we were lumped into groups of 4 and told to write a hit song in 10 minutes. Everyone came up with something pretty good. And later, (as I posted on another thread) I had a job writing the entire score for a musical already in production, in 6 weeks. I have found that being under that kind of pressure is great - you have no time for writers block or feeling sorry for yourself!!!Another great book is Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Nathalie Goldberg - although it's about writing prose it's still very inspiring and there are great exercises in it. When I joined Taxi at the beginning of 2008 I had a trunk full of music and songs and I was planning to record loads of those that had never seen the light of day. Every day I have so many new ideas I haven't even had to open the trunk! I find the listings a huge source of inspiration!Georgie

[flood]

This method is very useful in other things!In voiceover parlance (my main career), we call it "sneaking up on yourself". The idea is to very quickly yank yourself out of your comfort zone. Stripped of your usual methods and madness, the creative mind takes over and is distilled down to the parts that make your music or whatever, GREAT at the base level.It is a process of REMOVING the process of "over-thinking" things that many of us do all the time.Stripped of our usual defenses and expectations, that purely creative aspect of our minds takes over and the results are usually startlingly good.I love your take on it.Most importantly, it works. At least for me.