Alternate title: How to Write Solid Songs While You’re Still Learning the Craft
Writer’s block strikes for a variety of reasons. Over the past ten years, I’ve slowly become convinced that one of the biggest causes of writer’s block is that songwriting is such an open-ended and vague task. There are simply too many too many creative choices; they’re paralyzing! Given the task “Write a song of any length, on any topic, – how do you even get started? You could drown in the possibilities.
Creative restrictions really come to our rescue here because restricting yourself gives you a mercifully limited set of options to choose from. There’s a lot of value in giving yourself clear, specific, focused songwriting assignments. They reduce overwhelm and give you a sense of purpose.
Ironically, restrictions free you so that you can work more deeply and more extensively with the limited tools available. Restrictions create a sense of focus while you work and actually create a sense of focus in your finished work, too–giving it a stronger sense of cohesion and purpose.
Here’s my favorite part: Sticking to a set of restrictions also gives you a deeper experience with your chosen materials. Prompting yourself to deliberately use a new scale or chord or a new rhetoric technique is a great way to really fix that new bit of knowledge in your memory while creating good work at the same time.
Creative Restrictions are Everywhere in Art
Interior designers carefully choose limited color palettes – out of millions of available hues, they select just three to five colors to use in a particular room to give it a certain look and feel.
There are 12 tones in western music. Each basic chord musicians play contains just three of those twelve possible tones.
The pentatonic scale, which has inspired thousands upon thousands of blues and rock songs, selects only 5 of those twelve possible tones. That’s what artists mean when they say “less is more”: You can take limited materials and put them to surprisingly creative uses.
Finally, Haiku authors try to use just a few short syllables to evoke an entire experience for the reader. This simple, miniature poetic form has endured for centuries and attracted thousands of writers.
Complex Restrictions
Inventing clever “rules” that draw interesting work out of you can be a creatively satisfying pursuit in itself. Feel free to inflict multiple restrictions on yourself at once. Maybe you’ve recently been learning minor 6 chords and listening to salsa music, and you’d like to see what happens if you mix the minor 6 with salsa rhythms.
Invent restrictions based on whatever you’re learning and whatever you need practice with.
Restrictions Can Help You Out of Creative Ruts
There might come a time when you notice yourself turning to certain techniques, chords, song topics, or other patterns over and over again in your work. Sometimes this is a good thing – maybe you’re trying to find the best way to apply a certain technique. At other times, though, that technique becomes a kind of crutch that you just find yourself leaning on over and over without learning anything.
To get yourself out of a rut like that, try using creative restrictions to declare those overused techniques entirely off-limits.
Sometimes declaring what you don’t want to create is a great first step toward creating something you like. For example, you might write in your practice journal:
“No more songs in the key of C. The next one has to be in Bb.”
or:
“No more love lyrics for a month.”
As you’re analyzing the work of other songwriters and artists, collect interesting ideas for creative restrictions in your practice notebook– you’ll become a stronger songwriter and write presentable songs all at the same time.