mophilly wrote: ↑Tue Mar 30, 2021 2:54 pm
I have hundred of files with ideas for lyrics and songs. Some are nearly complete, with audio recordings to go with them, but many are merely snippets. A couplet or two, an idea and some lines. The problem is sorting and finding the right pages as I work the craft.
I heard once that Jack London would write 500 words a day, mostly after the household was in bed. While crafting of a story, he would hang sheets of paper with sections of prose on a couple clothes lines strung up in his office. He would run these back and forth to find the page he wanted. Sort of like a dry cleaners hanger trolley but for pages of prose.
What do you use to sort, scan, and otherwise keep your ideas in the forefront of your mind?
Mostly, I don't worry about that stuff. Oh, I do have various song ideas, be it in Outlook notes (I've got a "Song Ideas" folder) or in OneNote (I've got a Songwriting tab, with one song ideas entry and any meaningful starts I may have gotten, meant to be work-in-progress as I progress to a first draft, if I get that far, which I sometimes do and sometimes don't). But it is rare for me to actually look through those to "keep them in the forefront of my mind". Rather, I use the latter when actively trying to work on a project based on some other stimulus (e.g. a TAXI listing or real life inspiration that makes me want to pursue a specific concept), and I go through the former on those rare occasions where I'm working on something from a music first directions, not coming up with any organic ideas for lyrics, and wondering if any of my past notes might help get me past that "blank slate" hump.
While there are currently 175 notes in that Outlook folder, it's actually pretty rare for me to add something. Those notes were accumulated over the space of something like 25 years, which I guess averages out to 7 ideas a year (though most are probably 10 years or more old). Most of the time when I actually sit down to write a song, I work up something new on the spot (the OneNote environment, though that is a relatively new way for me to do things, and mostly specifically when working on writing something for a TAXI listing because it is an easy way to keep links to reference songs, the text of the listing itself, any notes I might make on songs from the listing, etc. under the same hood).
That said, there have definitely been times I've mined the old list of ideas, some of which are almost full lyrics and others which are just concepts and/or titles (and most everything in between). The nice thing about having things in OneNote or Outlook is I can easily search but, especially in the Outlook case, also browse by whatever the note's title is. I can also color code the Outlook notes, for example if I think something is especially promising but just don't have a clue on how to finish it at the time I enter it (or at some later point when reviewing it). Those notes can also be useful for looking for ideas to bring into a collaborative opportunity.
It might be worth noting that I'm far from a prolific songwriter. While I've written somewhere between 300 and 400 songs, that is over a very long period. My most prolific year was something like 50-75 songs, but that was with lots of cowriting with lyricists (and I wrote the music to the lyrics, not the other way around), so there was no blank slate syndrome to contend with. But there have been years where I haven't written a single song, and I'd guess my more typical number to be on the order of 10 songs a year. I mostly write either in response to specific opportunities or based on specific (real life) inspiration. It is rare for me to write just due to some detached "idea for a song" such as a clever hook. I know some really dedicated songwriters who have loads of cocktail napkins, and all sorts of things, with ideas, but anytime I've had a song sparked in that manner, I've just sat down and tried writing the song while whatever sparked it is still fresh in my mind.
I suppose if I were to try to come up with some system for organizing ideas, I'd probably be looking for some sort of database-like system that would allow a title, a free text field (for any lyric snippets), plus an arbitrary number of keywords (or tags, if you prefer) for things like subject matter (love, breakup, politics, etc.), genre (where applicable to the idea), and so on. That way, if I'm looking for a something to start a country love song, I could just search the keywords to see what matched, browse the titles of matching entries, and drill down to the text of anything that intrigued me.
Rick