Hey there five followers!
This week’s blog post is going to be short and sweet, seeing as how it’s a holiday weekend.
What do you do when you get frustrated by the process?
As I start to work on a song, I have an idea of where I want the song to go, and I even have a pretty clear picture of the imagery I want to use and the feeling…but as I continue through the writing process, it usually gets WORSE! I then have to go through the song and re-write it using the process I described last week.
For me, this is the most frustrating part of the whole thing: trying to re-capture the picture I have in my mind.
As I’ve stated before, sometimes I put the half-finished song away for while–years sometimes, while I let the idea crystallize and solidify and become more clear…or more likely, I give up in frustration and banish the half-a-song to the wood pile, only to try and salvage it later.
Here’s the reason I bring this up: I found a song contest I want to enter (don’t worry, one that has no entry fee), there are no real requirements for the song, the theme just has to be positive, like things are looking up, or things are turning around.
So rather than having to create something from scratch, I remembered a song I abandoned years ago out of frustration, and went scrounging through the wood pile…and the frustration was born again!
I think writing is about learning to deal with your frustration…working through it, trying not to be beaten by it, learning to turn it around.
Maybe people who aren’t very good at writing songs are just the ones that settle for “good enough” or get lazy and just go with their first impulsive inspiration…or maybe they meet their frustration threshold and can’t step beyond it.
On the other hand, maybe constantly demanding perfection and measuring yourself against your heroes CAUSES frustration.
…anyway, I don’t know what the point was, if I ever had one. I don’t have any answers, either. These are just some things I was thinking about this morning as I sat down to re-write the positive song for the tenth time…and reaching my frustration threshold.
This Week
I’ve been working on two songs, writing guitar-related articles, editing things in Audacity, reading and listening to lots of things.
I think I should get the new book by the founder of cdbaby…but I have no means right now….
Oh! Here’s something I made up this week (if I had a twitter account, I would’ve tweeted it):
The longer you are unemployed, the more likely you are to become a self-help guru.
Jonathan Coulton
Lyle Lovett
John Hiatt
See you next week!