To all you songwriters out there: How do YOU find ideas? What do you do when you have "writer's block"? See responses below for suggestions from filkers as well as comments at the end of this Dandelion Report LJ entry.

Also do check out Bill Sutton's thoughts on the topic and check out results to a similar poll in Jodi Krangle's great songwriting resource, The Muse's Muse.

Writer's Block?

I exercise the senses. I can do it in many ways. I can commune with nature or with my fellows. New places and new people make new thoughts.

I can get to new in several ways. To see the world in the tiniest things (that I might not have noticed before) is important to me. Conventions, with the new people and new sights, stimulate new production. And children (being its essence) are another good source of the new vitamin.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. The joy is

The World is so full of a number of things,
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.

-- Robert Louis Stevenson

... and I think that noone who can make an effort to look about them would ever run out of new. Beyond that, I've found that having happy thoughts of the present and banishing the worries of tomorrow allows any seeds of creativity that I have to germinate.

Princesses of the Seven Universes

You think them mad?
They dress from the chest of old,
Mistresses of thought and love.

Those two crazy maids
As they whistle and sing
And their ankle bells ring?

They see, they hear, and they touch:
They taste and sniff the odors
Of the water and the baking bread.

And best of all are the newnesses
Of the Princesses
Of the Seven Universes.

Well, I almost never write songs to a schedule, so songwriter's block isn't an issue for me. But sometimes a song will lie around for years before I can finish it. There's currently a parody of a friend's song which I'm working on -- I won't give details, since I want to surprise him -- for which I have two verses, but haven't been able to come up with a third verse that follows the scheme of the original. Talking with friends last weekend, I came up with an alternate approach to the third verse which may prove workable.

Sometimes all you have is a title and a great line or two, and that just isn't enough by itself. It can be worse to finish a great idea lamely than not to finish it at all.

I don't usually write to deadline, but in the SCA I used to join on-site songwriting contests every so often, so here goes.

If I'm trying to write on a particular topic, I often turn the topic around, examining it from all angles. Frequently the topic is so general that you need to gnaw a corner off it and just concentrate on that corner--and often that's the critical step (for me) for getting the juices flowing. A few ways to gnaw a corner off that frequently work for me are: take a character's point of view on the issue. Try this a couple of times with different characters. (e.g., if the topic is spaceflight, how does a shuttle pilot feel about it? The pilot's husband or daughter? a single mother in the ghetto?) Try to see how the issue might be related to a larger issue that you care about. Could it be used as a metaphor for something? (e.g. could spaceflight be made a metaphor for knowledge? imagination? love?) Could it be used as an example of a larger process? (spaceflight an example of increasing human capabilities as a result of technology--maybe start with stone tools, go to sailing ships, to the industrial revolution, finish with spaceflight or dream up something even farther out).

If you're well into the song and it doesn't seem to be coming together, is your song too scattered? If it can't seem to settle on saying one thing, if you're having trouble winding it up, the problem may be that you're trying to jam two or three songs into the space of one. Figure out where most of the song is heading and carefully prune away the stuff that's diverging; you can always save it for another song later.

Also you can get trapped in what mathematicians would call "a false minimum"--that is you can wind up with a fragment of song that you can't complete, and that you can't improve or make more complete by making small changes in it. That's when its time to make big changes. It's hard to explain how to do this--it's more than just "give the line a poke to rearrange it so a word that was in the middle winds up on the end" Look at the song and try to figure out what else it could say, what else it could be about. It has been about spaceflight up to this point but I can't get anywhere with it. Suppose I re-set it; put it in Niven's Smoke Ring, where humans can fly with the aid of "foot wings"--now can I take it somewhere? "Of all the creatures in the sky, only humans cannot fly"--can I make this some kind of lament over how humans don't belong here?

If it's the melody you're having trouble with, one activity I've found that makes me more melodically creative is to listen once to a large number of songs I don't know. I keep trying to recreate the melodies I heard, but since I can't remember them, and they all keep fading into each other, I end up creating something new.

I hope this helps. Yours--Cat

I how address "Writers Block"

- Write anything and not "edit" the ideas in my head, let myself ramble aimlessly.

- Like Cat said - Narrow it down, if my ideas are too scattered.

- Give it to someone else to beat at :-)

- And . .. Don't believe in "writer's block" (which I don't). It's not that you are "blocked," it's that you're distracted with other things, maybe songwriting isn't a priority right now, you're just too tired (the case for me these days), etc.

One of the techniques I use, since I usually get the tune and part of the lyrics done pretty quickly, is to play it over and over until the tune is stuck in my head. It doesn't take long for my brain to start filling in the blank spots in self-defence. This works well if I'm working on a deadline - like trying to finish "Fangrrl" in time for Conchord.

Some of the lyrics I come up with this way are total non-sequeters, but writing them down helps cement the tune ane keeps the creative wheels turning. (Remember that the original title of "Yesterday" was "Scrambled Eggs"!)

If a song gives me too much trouble, I'll stick it off in a drawer somewhere and work on it later, maybe as much as a year.

I wish I had some ideas, I have such bad writers block that I have written one song in a year. Stuff I've tried that's worked in the past but not now:

Relaxing about a song that's blocked, tell myself it's ok not to finish it right now.

Playing around with Chord progressions on the guitar, sometimes a cool sound will trigger a song idea.

Read books and jot ideas for songs if something has caught my attention.

I have three ways to avoid blocks, and the one that works best is the notebook. I carry it everywhere. It usually has 30-40 fragments or works-in-progress, some of them more than a decade old; when I don't have any ideas, I flip through them. If I catch on one, I start off with the mechanics and hope for momentum.

Usually my best songs come from just sitting down and writing what's weighing on me that day. There may not be any great passion going on at the moment, but there's some thing I feel best about and some thing I need to let go.

However, the most important thing is to fill your waking hours with experiences. It revs up the mind and cultivates luck.

I almost always write with guitar in hand, so my first suggestion when blocked is to pick up the guitar. :)

Assuming a general block (as opposed to a block on a specific song), start by noodling a chord progression. Sing nonsense words at it. Listen to what the mood of the music is trying to tell you. What's the picture in your mind? Can you put words to it?

"Cinnamon Rain" started from the first line of the chorus: "Cold night and cinnamon rain, bringing back a scent I'd forgotten". And I asked why he'd forgotten and got the second line, "Old lights, fire in my brain, bringing back the memory of you". So the memory has been suppressed, possibly against his will. Now how did he get in this situation? And there's a picture of him standing in a great pine forest, somewhere in the mountains, it's cold and just starting to rain, and...

The story will be happy to tell itself to you if you just give it the chance.

Alternatively, there's getting blocked on a particular song. I wrote the chorus for "Half a Chance" at Capricon, the weekend after Columbia fell. And I picked up the guitar and started arguing with what it was trying to tell me, because I'd decided what the story was supposed to be. The guitar had something else in mind. Once I stopped arguing with it and put my preconceived notions aside (possibly for use elsewhere at some other time), I wrote the rest of the song fairly quickly at Minicon.

Sometimes getting someone else involved helps to trigger your own thoughts. I was stuck on a song based on Peter F. Hamilton's "Mindstar" universe, for which I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do but the words were not coming - and hadn't been for several months.

I eventually published a "anyone else read this" comment on rec.music.filk, and got a reply from a lady I had never met (although I have now!). She had also read the books, was happy to take my ideas, and threw me back some lines, some of which I used directly, some of which turned into a bridge, and some of which triggered other ideas for me. Net result - "Mindstar" (I am to song titles what Terry Pratchett's Leonard of Quirm is to names of inventions!).

I might have got there without asking for help - it wouldn't have been nearly as fast, nor the same song.

Ideas are easy, right now I have at least 6-7 songs brewing in my head. Ideas that end up as good songs with more than a verse and a chourus? OF course that's writers block kicking in. I have yet to fugure out what to do about my writers block. I've written 3 songs in two years. I really wish I knew why I was blocked, it's driving me crazy.

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