The Sunday Songwriter: Feeling stuck? Get your hands dirty.

Four links on creativity and the craft of songwriting.

Stuck in a creative dry spell? Get your hands dirty.

Here’s a post by Newspaper Blackout poet and Show Your Work! author Austin Kleon about a very messy sketchbook he kept for almost a year.

I started this 300-page Miquelrius notebook in July of ’09. I wanted it to be the opposite of all those precious, perfect Moleskines you see online… I wanted it to be a real sketchbook: a place to think on the page.

I’m with Austin on this one. Creative projects are messy. Thought processes are messy. Trying to enforce order on them too soon can stunt their growth.

Let your notebook be messy — you can always polish, iterate, refine, and arrange the things worth keeping later. But for the time being? Screw perfectionism. Today’s a good day to buy a simple graph notebook and some black markers — and get your hands dirty.

I’d like to invite you to share your new, messy, unapologetically imperfect notebook with us on the social network of your choice:

• Share your notebook via Twitter
• via Facebook
• via Tumblr

I know I’ll be sharing mine.

Austin will let you peek inside his messy, messy notebook if you click here.

A Forest of Writing Techniques

Rhetoric has some negative connotations nowadays. We use that word to describe the empty speech of smooth-talking politicians.

But rhetoric is much more than that; it’s an art dating back thousands of years. Rhetoric is the discipline of observing how language works in any piece of writing or speech — then using what you learn in your own writing and speech.

As I wrote in the recent Art of Daily Practice course, music theory helps musicians think, communicate, and study very specifically and deliberately.

Rhetoric is like music theory, but for creative writing. It lets you isolate and deeply practice specific techniques like ecphrasis — the art of vivid description — or anadiplosis, which means repeating the last word of each line at the beginning of the next.

Silva Rhetoricae is a free resource written by Gideon Burton, a professor who clearly loves language in a way that few people do.

Click here to enter the Forest of Rhetoric.

“Music Has Become the Spark of my Intellectual Curiosity.”

Did you hear about that student from Long Island who won admission to every college he applied to, including all eight Ivy League schools? Kwasi’s transcript was phenomenal, and his essay sealed the deal.

It highlighted the idea that music can have a very positive ripple effect on the rest of your life, if you choose to read life lessons into the things you learn about music or lyric writing.

Music has become the spark of my intellectual curiosity. I directly developed my capacity to think creatively around problems due to the infinite possibilities in music. There are millions of combinations of key signatures, chords, melodies, and rhythms in the world of music that wait to become attached to a sheet of staff lines and spaces. As I began to explore a minute fraction of these combinations[…] my mind began to formulate roundabout methods to solve any mathematical problem, address any literature prompt, and discover any exit in an undesirable situation. —from Kwasi Enin’s college essay.

It’s not essential reading, but you can Read the full essay here via the New York Post.

Developing Verse Ideas From a Title

This gem from Pat Pattison is about thinking through the concept of a song, your chosen title — then developing verses that all recolor that chorus from different perspectives. This is one of the most essential skills of songwriting: that art of repeating the same thing multiple times as a chorus or a refrain… but having it feel fresh and meaningful each time it comes around.

Developing Verse Ideas From a Title on Pat Pattison’s homepage.