Any experienced creative professional understands what it’s like to be in a creative funk. Sometimes you feel aimless in your project, as though you’ve lost all sight of your end-goal and are feeling your way through the dark, hoping for the best. Sometimes it’s not the end-goal that’s the problem at all, it’s how on earth you’re supposed to get there; like you’ve got a dozen and twenty options on your plate and only one or maybe two are actually going to be the right path for your project, and you have zero idea how to even approach deciding which path to take let alone beginning the journey.
In short, it sucks.
For whatever reason, your generally free-flowing creative juices are clogging up the machine and you probably have a deadline to contend with. At best, it’s inefficient. At worst, it’s demoralizing and depressing. Performance anxiety doesn’t just occur to people who go on-stage or in front of the camera. When your entire career track depends on your ability to consistently perform at a high standard of creativity and skill, whether that’s music or even architecture, it can be an overwhelming level of pressure upon your shoulders if you don’t have the tricks and tools in place to channel that pressure into productivity.
But that is, in effect, part of what you signed up for when you went down this career path. Yes, there’s something fundamentally unique about creative jobs. It’s play. It’s passion. It’s a puzzle to solve. But it’s also a job. One of the biggest lies that pervades essentially every creative industry is this myth about artistic purity. It’s this idea that all true art comes directly from the benevolent muse and through the artist like he is a prophet.
(Anyone with even a little bit of training in logic will immediately recognize the descriptor “true” as a hallmark of the No True Scotsman fallacy. The word “true”, as a subject modifier of objective statements, is more often than not, quite ironically, false.)
Technically speaking, you cross the threshold from amateur to professional when you actually make some money in your creative field. (Although, if you introduce yourself as a professional songwriter, people will of course assume it is your primary profession and not a side-hustle.) What I think is a more significant distinction is the one between a professional songwriter and a working songwriter. A working songwriter actually treats it as their vocation. They can produce a consistently high volume of content of a reasonable caliber.
That level of creative work ethic is without a doubt (and if you’ve been keeping up with our other articles, you should know this already) far, far more valuable than any songwriter who only worships at the altar of the inspiration. Unless you already have it made and only pursue the songwriting craft for the fun of it, you probably don’t have the luxury of waiting for lightning to strike every time you need a song written. You need to learn to go make your own storms, do a little rain dance, attract the lightning with a key and a kite and harness that potential energy for your own use.
We’ve talked at length before about some tools for finding that initial inspiration.when you need it, but today I wanted to talk more about some tools and tips for overcoming songwriter’s block, especially when you’ve already begun a project and find yourself at a crossroads, or facing a brick wall. What do you do?
1) Re-evaluate.
It’s worth mentioning, first and foremost, that the reason you might be stuck with nowhere to go is that you’ve started off in the wrong direction, or possibly taken a wrong turn along the way and gotten yourself all turned around. It’s important that you stop, take stock and maybe even retrace your steps a little before you give up on your chosen track completely. Perhaps you were on a roll but you’ve gotten yourself stuck on this one particular word or phrase and created a mental log jam.
Do you know how loggers handle a log jam? Dynamite. They blow a huge hole right in the center of it. Free up the flow. In the writing world, we call it “killing your darlings”. Often, in the creative process you’ll come up with something that you love, but is the absolute wrong fit for your project. You can get stuck for hours or even days trying to make the rest of your project work around this one darling of yours that you refuse to see as the reason you’re even stuck in the first place. But this is where you need to get your craft toolbelt on and see it for the problem that it is. Killing your darlings will usually reveal a better option that will get you right back on track again, with everything flowing smoothly once more. So, make sure, before you stop working on your songwriting to go workout and clear your head or something, that you stop and actually see if you can figure out where you’ve gone wrong. Your productivity will thank you later for applying some cool reason and skill to the problem instead of playing the diva straight away.
2) Re-locate.
(These won’t be in any definitive order, so the numbers are somewhat superfluous in terms of your own plan of attack, but still, it’ll make it easier for you to remember this way.)
One of the greatest advantages of the modern age is the pocket-sized maneuverability of our technology. If you write a lot of your stuff digitally, straight into a particular program, you can essentially work wherever your laptop is. If you’re more old-fashioned and prefer your writing pad, great, that’s easily moved as well. Guitars are a pretty portable instrument too if that’s integral to your craft, but most of us now with smartphones have access to a whole slew of virtual instruments at our fingertips. All in all, you’re probably not locked down to a particular location while you’re working. So, change it up.
You might decide to face a different direction, look out a window, go to a different room, leave the house altogether, whatever. A change in scenery changes your mindset. Gets you thinking outside the box you were in before.
Several years back and more than a few cities away, I found a nice secluded spot with an amazing forest view on a loading dock (of all places!) at the back of a university campus not too far from where I lived. I went through a period of high creative output there, going there every single week for 6 months and churning out a song every time I sat down on that loading dock with my guitar. Something about the sights and smells of the scenery there just unlocked something in my mind, and the music and lyrics would flow. Eventually, however, it began to be inundated with smokers, becoming perpetually too crowded for my processes, and I had to give it up and find a new songwriting spot.
I’ve found it best to have several of these type of locations at your disposal. Places where you can be alone. Places with some connection to nature in some form, plants, animals, water, etc. Places with particular acoustic advantages, like stairwells, bathrooms, etc. Having multiple inspiring locations (or inspirocations) to bounce between when you get stuck can revolutionize your productivity. Of course, as a working songwriter, you really want to have the discipline and craft-level skill-set to be able to work anywhere, anytime. But reality dictates otherwise. Sometimes you just need a break and a bite to eat. And sometimes you need to change where you are for something a little more inspiring.
3) Re-juvenate.
This one’s pretty straight forward. We all need sleep for continued brain function, but 51% of adults worldwide report not getting enough sleep nightly, with up to 80% saying they use the weekends to try and catch up on sleep. Sure, this might be manageable if you work in a factory or an office, in retail of the food service industry. But studies show distinct linkages between REM sleep, dreams and creativity. HIghly creative jobs require highly-rested minds.
If this is the case, luckily, you probably don’t need to go have a three-hour nap to solve this one. Mythbusters demonstrated that workers on fishing trawlers who need to stay awake for 30 hours at a time, if given a timed 20-minute nap every 6 hours, perform multiple times better on mental and physical problem-solving challenges after 30 hours, despite feeling no more rested than those who stay awake for 30 hours straight without naps.
In other words, if you’re not getting enough sleep and you think it’s interfering with your ability to write songs, stopping to take a 20-minute nap, even though it probably won’t make you feel any better, will increase your applicable brain function by a factor of 3 to 8.
4) Re-hydrate.
This one’s similar to the one above in that it comes back to brain function. A well-hydrated brain functions better than a dehydrated one, and 80% of adults self-report not drinking enough water. There are undoubtedly a lot of jobs you can do while you’re a little dehydrated because you’re following a checklist of things to do. This isn’t one of them. You have a responsibility to yourself, your clients and your music to be at the top of your game every time you sit down to create. Sure, it’s not always going to be possible, but you can live good habits.
Sometimes, in the throws of creativity, hours pass and I find I haven’t reached for that water bottle once. So if I find myself stuck, I’ll do my best to down somewhere between 600mL and a full liter of water to rapidly rehydrate my brain. I might go to the bathroom more but it sure helps my creativity.
5) Re-generate.
I hinted at this earlier, so you should have seen this one coming: exercise. If you’re rested, fed, hydrated and you’ve changed up your location and you’re still drawing blanks, then one of the best things you can do for yourself and your creativity is exercise.
15 minutes of vigorous exercise (jumping jacks, push-ups, crunches, running on the spot, etc.) will elevate your heart rate, flush out toxins, release endorphins and generally put you in a better mood, even if you’re only relieved that it’s over. All these effects increase your creativity and brain function, not to mention the sheer physicality of the exercise allows you to reset your brain more fully into the task at hand afterward.
Maybe you could even kill two birds with one stone by going for a run around the block or so. Giving yourself a brief change of scenery, new sights, sounds and smells to more effectively clear the mental and emotional palette, is a great way to quickly get things pumping again without taking long breaks away from your writing process.
6) Re-member.
Obviously, there’s a tonne out there online about dealing with writer’s block. And maybe your projects tend not to have the same level of urgency that these suggestions implied. Maybe you’re free to drop it for the day when you get yourself into a pickle. Maybe it can be as easy for you as putting down the song that isn’t working for you anymore and picking up another you’ve only half-finished.
But maybe, just maybe, you’re me 15 years ago. Maybe you’re that aspiring songwriter who does it for fun and passion and doesn’t even dream of doing it permanently because you don’t really know yet that it’s something you can learn to harness like the sun. Maybe you don’t know yet that it’s a craft you can develop just like any other expertise or skillset. Maybe you don’t know yet that you can overcome any hurdle standing in the way of your dreams.
Even Songwriter’s Block.
