Many of my songwriting friends and students have suffered this dreaded feeling at least once: the feeling of wanting to write a song, but having no lyric ideas at all. Some of you may be suffering from that condition at this very moment.
*snort
Excuse me. Writer’s block, eh? Wow. Jeez. How terrible. You poor thing.
*snicker
Oh, I’m mortified. I don’t know how that escaped me. No, no, I’m not making fun of your predicament. I just, uh, I just thought of a joke a friend told me earlier, that’s all. Very sorry. Back to business.
Listen: your problem is serious. It’s seriously seriously bad. It’ll take drastic measures to get you on the mend again. But I can help you. Come closer.
Closer.
…closer.
*whack
I’m sorry I had to be the one to do it, but seriously–you needed that.
Songs don’t build themselves.
Look: there are song scraps everywhere. They’re just lying around on the ground, waiting for you to pick them up and nail them together! Here’s the secret to banishing writer’s block forever: you’ve got to look at a two-by-four and see the potential for a house.
Sometimes it is difficult to break out of writer’s block while in the zone of music and writing. Hence, it is recommended that you take a break from writing and engage in other activities that will help refresh your mind. An example could be computer games such as Diablo 2. In such games, you can compete against rivals in-game and win many matches, which is something that is likely to bring you joy. If you enjoy playing these games, you may also want to purchase in-game items from yesgamers.com that will enhance the experience. Likewise, you can take a short mountain hike, hang out with friends, or watch your favorite movie to ease your writer’s block.
A vision requires imagination, of course, but you’ve got plenty of that. You’re sitting here reading about songwriting there’s no shortage of imagination in the type of person who invests their time in creative pursuits.
Think of everything you witness and observe as a scrap of wood-the grocery cashier’s shy smile, the sound of a far-off church bell, the way the shadows of leaves writhe on the sidewalk-that’s all raw material, lumber that you can process and use.
Many books and articles will tell you to be on the lookout for song ideas. I’m sure I’ve dispensed that advice a hundred or a thousand times. But it’s not precise enough. You’ve got to raise your sensitivity until you see not only ideas for titles and hook lines, but also ideas for concepts, themes, characters, storylines, and imagery.
There’s more song material sitting around than any one of us can possibly hope to use! Titles and hook lines are great finds, but they often come to us when we overhear them or they flash suddenly into our minds. Such ideas may seem beyond our conscious control, but these bursts do come from the collision of thoughts and stimuli within our own minds. We can make them happen, though not by just sitting around willing it to work. That’s like trying to build a mansion using only your mind. Good luck, buddy.
You have to feed in some raw material to get anything out.
Eureka!
Ideas are just combinations.
Perhaps two pieces of information suddenly come together to form a beautiful line that has internal rhyme and alliteration. Maybe two images have a nice relationship that you can express in like form: the letter’s in the bottle and the bottle’s in the river.
We’re lucky when ideas hit us over the head, but not all of us get lucky in that way every day or even every week. Don’t worry about it! You can still be a hard-working, prolific, brilliant songwriter. You’ve just got to learn to work with what materials you have available. Start from scratch.
Let’s say I just came in from a walk, and I’ve got a scrap of imagery: the sound of a church bell ringing far-off. It sounded sort of chilling, and I think maybe it would make a nice bit of detail in… well, I don’t know what kind of song yet. I’ve just got a hunch about it.
So I write the word down at the top of a blank page or text document. Bell. That’s the first word of what could be a new masterpiece. I have many options for exploring this little two-by-four of an idea.
- I could ask myself: what does a bell symbolize? Timekeeping? Celebration? Warning? Religion? I could look up the word “bell” in a few different dream dictionaries to get more perspectives on what a bell might represent. You might select one interpretation, or use several. Don’t be afraid of acknowledging an image’s many facets!
- Bell is a noun. I might try fitting some adjectives to it-selectively or at random. Heavy bell. Relentless bell. Chilling bell. Melting bell.
- Let’s give verbs a try, too! Verbs are action words, so let’s think action. What might one do to a bell? We might beat it. We might hide beneath it. We might loathe it. We might hang it. We could also express the above ideas as things the bell does to us instead: it sings to us when we beat it. It shelters us when we hide beneath it. It beats our eardrums with its tongue.
- We might even try writing a bit of prose description that includes the bell, freely adding fictional elements. Picture somebody ringing or hearing the bell. What are they doing? Where are they? Is it day or night? Who is this person, anyway?
- We could do a bit of free association or object writing about bells.
- We could research a specific bell, or several, learning their histories. Who made them? Were they dedicated in memory of anybody? Is this the bell’s first home? What’s it made of? Where’d that material come from?
- We could also research to see if there were any famous people by the name of Bell and this is easily done by combing through old obituaries or newspaper archives. You can go now and have a look at some examples.
- Make any kind of investigative adventure you like-and if you think of a really good one that I haven’t included here, please let me know in the comments so I can credit you and include it in a future post!
Conclusion
Stay sharp in your daily life, and stay sensitive to even the tiniest components of your future masterpieces. Collect tiny observations and questions about life, and investigate them through imagination and research.
If you take the time to follow a hunch on paper, you’ll turn up richer and richer song material. Keep at it long enough, and you’ll eventually receive one of those flashes of inspiration that’s powerful enough to knock the wind from your lungs and send you running to your notebook.
After that first flash, you’ll be hooked. 
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On one hand, *WHACK* made me laugh because I didn’t expect it and I TOTALLY agree.
On the other hand, one thing I experienced and see others experience is that once you decide to improve your songwriting by learning about songwriting, either formally or by listening to the best writers, it is often followed by a sudden drop in the quality of one’s own writing…or by the inability to write at all.
But that’s an illusion. You’re no worse a writer and no less creative than you were before you started studying…it’s just that you just reset the height of the bar that you are hoping to clear. You are aiming higher, so the *distance* between where you are and where you want to go is farther. YOU are no shorter…it’s just that your goal is higher. But we panic and hate our songs or stop writing for a while. Susan Tucker, whose wonderful books are interviews with successful writers, said just last night that we all (ideally) go through 3 phases–a) writing to write, without worrying about commercial requirements, b) writing for the market and losing some of our creative spice and momentum, and c) blending the creative and the commercial successfully. Some of us rebel against b), some freak out and feel tapped before we get to c).
The answer to all this is to keep writing. Try everything, especially not judging. Keep looking at a variety of songs you love and figuring out why they work. Don’t plagiarize but see if you can borrow the spirit of the why. Try lots of different ways of coming up with ideas and fleshing them out. Buy a new guitar. Fall in love. Work with collaborators (especially a collaborator who’s not in that same stuck phase that you are…but maybe you’ll catalyze even a fellow stuckee…)
Reach out for support from your fellow writers.
Being asked to write for money also works. I got back into writing because I had a good shot at a Mark Anthony cut. That worked.
Ernest Hemingway said “The first draft of anything is s#$@.” Go write some @#$@…it’ll be Hemingway!
Great post. I feel that songwriters more than most other creatives need a good whack every so often.
And I agree with you too Ruth the answer (to this and a lot of other problems) is keep writing!
So excuse me, I’m off to write…
I uh, haha, um, should probably be following your example. I’ll be writing to you soon here, Mr. Blick! I’m alive!
Hey Ruth!
I like the high jump analogy. While I haven’t written commercially, I do have my own quality standards for my songs. Every time my appreciation of music or lyrics grows more complex, there is potential for frustration while my abilities struggle to catch up with my tastes. This seems to happen more often with the musical aspects of songwriting than the lyrical half, though.
And oh yes, at all costs keep writing. 🙂 It’s easier to keep writing than to start writing.