Writer's block...

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mjr

mjr

ADD -- blessing and curse
I'm in a major case of writer's block right now. I'd say I haven't written anything in a good 2-3 months.

Any thoughts (besides just writing down random things) to break out of the funk?

I've got some topics bouncing around in my head, but no muse as far as lines go...
 
Riff Bag

I am also a composer. I'm a better guitarist than singer though.

I know it's not what you want to hear, but you have to try it.


Divine inspiration someone???

Poets write poems without music. You need the music. Even silly lyrics work fine on music (i'm sure your stuff isn't silly), but they are horrible when recited as poetry. If it wasn't for the music, many lyrics would have never seen the light of day. BSpears anyone?

[ you'll need a keyboard or guitar plus a mic for your voice for this to work ]


When I'm in a rutt, I turn on my recording gear and record what I call a "riff bag". These are little riffs that may or may not go anywhere, but I don't get stuck. If it doesn't work then move on to the next riff.

All riffs in the same project, not seperate.

Riff A might be bluesy, Riff B could be jazzy .. etc etc.

I usually use a metronome, but it's not required.

Try it. Force yourself to sing a little stupid lyric on it. Record it. (Yeah it's 2 seconds, or 10 seconds .. who cares.)

Then MOVE ON to the next stupid riff.

You'll find something magical will happen once you've gotten about 10 of these silly go-nowhere riffs (and /or vocals) down.

.. and don't get stuck trying to make great riffs either.

Just hold a chord for 4 beats and move to another if you need to.
Keep it short. Try to sing on it. Whatever comes to mind.

Again, then MOVE ON.

I won't ruin the surprise. But needless to say, you'll start seeing patterns.

You'll understand why it is that you had a block, and that it wasn't a block after all.

DO IT!!! I guarantee it works.

Try it for a few days.
 
You are welcome to have my book on writing lyrics. PM me with your email address and I'll send it to you. It's called "The Little Shop of Lyrics."

One chapter will walk you through just sitting down and writing a song with no prior idea what you are going to write. I'm the one doing it in the book, but you can do the same thing at the same time.

I am never blocked. Never. If I am not writing it's because I'm not sleeping, which is most of the time. So, I self medicate with booze most of the time. A guy will do drastic things to sleep. It all starts with sleep. I write music in my sleep. Have you heard "Get There?" I just woke up and wrote it down.

I don't believe in writer's block. You just need to think laterally and not vertically.

If you want to move on, read the book.

Wig:)
 
I was raised on Zeppelin,Beatles and Hendrix, but most songwriters know more than one genre.

So I'd suggest looking at some past greats like Tadd Dameron for instance, because good songwriting is good songwriting, it doesn't matter what instruments they used or what year it was done.

Cole Porter, Jobim, Gershwin, those are the Bachs and Beethovens of the last 100 years.

Check out Duke Ellington's band when Sonny Greer was the drummer.
 
hmmm...

sounds like your trying to write music (chords? melody line?) and lyrics simultaneously, perhaps.

Try forgetting about lyrics, and just make a piece of music. Just make a piece of MUSIC, with no regard to lyrics. Do whatever you want, making sure you LIKE it at all times. Try anything, keep wnat your ear likes, throw the rest out.

When the song is getting fleshed out, or "almost done"... just sit back and listen to it a hundred or more times, and eventually a lyric will "pop" into your head over some melody hook, completely unbidden.

every time you listen to it after THAT, that little part has those words on it automatically, you wont even have to try to hear it anymore.

you can then work the rest out... after you hear a hook or two "turn into" words.
 
Turn on the radio, flick the dial, and start listening.. Always helps me.
 
Give yourself a deadline.

Tell yourself "I have to have a song written by next Tuesday!" (Doesn't have to be next Tuesday, but keep it realistic. If you tell yourself "I have to have a song written by 2:00PM today!" you'll probably collapse under the pressure, and if you tell yourself "I have to have a song written by January 2011" you're no more motivated than you are right now.)

Respect the deadline. Stick to it. You'll probably still spend a few hours or days waffling, wanking, & worrying...but eventually you'll find that a concrete time-specific goal allows you to be more decisive during the writing process, and you'll probably skip through issues that you might otherwise dwell on. Remember, the point is to write something...not necessarily something brilliant, that comes later. Just start producing, that'll free you up from writer's block.

A few years ago Howard Harrison & I had a project we called "Song Club". It was simply a motivational mechanism to keep us writing and recording music. Once a week we would pick a topic -- it could be any topic, the more atypical the better; some of them included

- Weapons Of Antiquity
- Posers
- My Client Wore The Weirdest Sweater
- Sports
- Ronald Reagan
etc

-- and then we'd have seven days to write a song based on that topic, and record a full-blown demo of the new tune. A week later we'd get together, listen to one another's demo, and then decide on the topic for the following week.

We each churned out a song a week for an entire summer. That's more prolific than either of us had been in the previous 3 or 4 years! And while it seems like some of those ideas should be throwaways, in actuality 3 or 4 of them wound up being the best tunes I'd written in ages.

Deadlines rock.
 
mjr said:
I'm in a major case of writer's block right now. I'd say I haven't written anything in a good 2-3 months.

Any thoughts (besides just writing down random things) to break out of the funk?

I've got some topics bouncing around in my head, but no muse as far as lines go...
Click to expand...

This works for me often - grab a newspaper

Then, grab some random cool sounding headlines to use as the titles of songs.

Challenge yourself to "make up a story" in the form of a song for each headline.

The best songwriting is storytelling - if you don't have a story to tell, make some stories up!

After all, I Am the Walrus, koo koo koo joob!

Any time I think I may be stuck
I can grab some news and change my luck
Even though it always takes some time
You can get some cool words that will rhyme

You can break out, you can run your old train down the line
And you should not doubt, every thing will work out fine
Because it's you, you know it's you.
 
People say when you're writing you gotta keep writing an hour a day. I'm like, Why? When you've got nothing to say, when your day job just makes you tired, there ain't nothing new to say.
When I've had a hard day,
my head has a hole.

Though I could write a song about how I miss,youthful days and head filled of thoughts.
But a lass, she ain't gonna come waltzing in; just a small man, a head full of nothing.
 
Most people fear the Reaper
Chuck Norris made her a weeper
Chuck Norris is a staple gun
Staple your ass to a hotdog bun

But mjr is a bad mofo
Likes hard booze like sweet Old Crow
Kicks little kids for the hell of it
Street cred earned, he is legit

But then he whined about writers block
Forgot it rhymed with big hard cock
So I got my pen and I wrote this down
Take it or leave it I ain’t renown

Get yo chin up off the floor
Write about blood or guts and gore
Write about life and how hard it is
Write about the life in the music biz
Write about the light in the morning fog
Wrote about the fight in a junk yard dog
Write about the pain in your shrunken heart
Write about the rain when she said depart
Write about the joy when new love came round
Write about the chick who by chance you found
Write the ass who wrote this post
Write about the thing that you hate the most.
 
mjr said:
I'm in a major case of writer's block right now. I'd say I haven't written anything in a good 2-3 months.

Any thoughts (besides just writing down random things) to break out of the funk?

I've got some topics bouncing around in my head, but no muse as far as lines go...
Click to expand...

I don't know about lyricists' blocks, but I'm just emerging from a compositional block that lasted 1 1/2 years! I released a CD last February. I did a tremendous amount of writing for that project...I rejected 5 songs for every one I used. Then, for whatever reason, the spigot just turned off. For months I sat in my studio...keyboard and modules humming, but absolutely nothing happening. I listened to alot of the old material, and some stuff I did 20 years ago...anything to prime the pump, but again, nothing. I started doing some collab work and found that if I wasn't actually having to write the tune, I could still arrange and adorn projects freely...it was weird, but I just couldn't seem to create. I tried everything....forcing deadlines (which was just setting the placemats for a nice meal of defeat), listening and trying to co-opt a groove and build something over it...again, nothing. I finally resigned myself to the apparent fact that I must've turned some corner in my life and composing was now behind me.
Then, last month, I went back into the studio after being asked to collab on a CD project. And there it was, as if it never left. I'm composing again...maybe not at the rate I was a couple of years ago, but at a better clip than I thought I'd ever achieve.
The end result is, I just don't know what happened to make it stop or start again 18 months later. I tried everything...even gigging with a band on a regular basis again. Nothing appeared to work...but maybe something did.
 
Rewrite lyrics to an existing song.

Read the newspaper (or any random article on Wikipedia even) and make notes of interesting words that could be song titles or hooks.

Turn the radio on really low and you'll start to hear songs in a different way, it's hard to explain but you'll hear words that aren't there, your head is filling in the blank spaces.
 
Manslick said:
Most people fear the Reaper
Chuck Norris made her a weeper
Chuck Norris is a staple gun
Staple your ass to a hotdog bun

But mjr is a bad mofo
Likes hard booze like sweet Old Crow
Kicks little kids for the hell of it
Street cred earned, he is legit

But then he whined about writers block
Forgot it rhymed with big hard cock
So I got my pen and I wrote this down
Take it or leave it I ain’t renown

Get yo chin up off the floor
Write about blood or guts and gore
Write about life and how hard it is
Write about the life in the music biz
Write about the light in the morning fog
Wrote about the fight in a junk yard dog
Write about the pain in your shrunken heart
Write about the rain when she said depart
Write about the joy when new love came round
Write about the chick who by chance you found
Write the ass who wrote this post
Write about the thing that you hate the most.
Click to expand...
I can't believe nobody responded to this! This is awesome, and all joking aside, would make a great song, along the lines of "Short People". JMHO....

-Mike
 
Strat1958 said:
I can't believe nobody responded to this! This is awesome, and all joking aside, would make a great song, along the lines of "Short People". JMHO....

-Mike
Click to expand...

Bob kicks out some incredible lyrics.
 
I like to go to a library, look around, read some books a little. I find lots of ideas in a library.
 
Mike , Tey - thanks for the props.

Ride has a good point - reading, not to get ideas per se but to put your mind into a different thinking system; to change the cadence of your own thought pattern, learn new words.
A writer’s arsenal is their command of the language (and Word’s spell check of course). Not to mention the amazing array of tools on the net – rhyming sites, thesauruses etc.

Reading is the best way to get into someone else’s head. You are literally thinking their thoughts.

I like to read Annie Proulx, that broad has got some balls.
 
one way to push this approach a little is to record a vocal track over the music of just gibberish/scat singing/whatever, with a good melody, then listen to that and pull words from the meaningless syllables.
SEDstar said:
sounds like your trying to write music (chords? melody line?) and lyrics simultaneously, perhaps.

Try forgetting about lyrics, and just make a piece of music. Just make a piece of MUSIC, with no regard to lyrics. Do whatever you want, making sure you LIKE it at all times. Try anything, keep wnat your ear likes, throw the rest out.

When the song is getting fleshed out, or "almost done"... just sit back and listen to it a hundred or more times, and eventually a lyric will "pop" into your head over some melody hook, completely unbidden.

every time you listen to it after THAT, that little part has those words on it automatically, you wont even have to try to hear it anymore.

you can then work the rest out... after you hear a hook or two "turn into" words.
Click to expand...
 
TeyshaBlue said:
I don't know about lyricists' blocks, but I'm just emerging from a compositional block that lasted 1 1/2 years! I released a CD last February. I did a tremendous amount of writing for that project...I rejected 5 songs for every one I used. Then, for whatever reason, the spigot just turned off.
Click to expand...


There's a wonderfully astute axiom about the music business -- I forget who said this quote originally -- but it basically says

"You've got your entire life to write the music for your first CD.

You've got 18 months to write the music for your second CD."
 
I'm not sure if your "block" is lyrics or chord progressions. I can usually get over "lyric" block by reading a book - sometimes a collection of short stories because of the different subject matter in each story - i haven't thought too too deeply on this but it probably has something to do with seeing words on paper and the images those words create. - obviously they're short stories so i can pick and choose which ones I read in one book
If i have a "chord" block i try to listen to music I generally don't listen to... sometimes classical like Mozart or early 50's-early 60's Jazz - that usually gets me thinking about chords flowing into each other different ways.
 
The time when nothing new will come, is a time when you can go back to all those 'old' half-finished ideas and work on them.

The worst thing to do is try too hard to come up with something, which will not be inspired, just forced.
 
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