You Have a Writing Process, Even If You Don’t Know It
One day an artist decides “I’m going to paint a picture”. She gets out her supplies, picks out a color, and immediately starts painting in the top left corner. After finding a basic shape, she fills it in and starts adding details. Lighting, shadows, blur, etc. Then she works on background elements, including the general background color but also perhaps a landscape or objects. She goes over and over it, making sure the shading and contrast are just right. After an hour the whole section is complete! But it’s also only a single square inch big. Someone comes up and says “Oh, what are you painting a picture of?” and she says “I don’t know, I hadn’t thought of that yet.”
Or an author decides to write a book. He sits down at the computer and starts typing. He writes a few words, deletes them, writes a few more, deletes them. This goes on for a while until he finds an opening sentence that he likes. From here things start to flow and he ends up writing two paragraphs.He stops and goes back to the beginning to check what he’s written. He makes some changes, swaps out some vocabulary, and fills in a few gaps. Four or five more passes on these two paragraphs and they are really shining! A friend sees him writing and asks “What is your book about?” He pauses because he doesn’t know. Is he writing a poem, a short story, an epic 8-book saga? He was so focused on making the first two paragraphs amazing, he hadn’t taken time to think about what he was writing in the first place.
These examples obviously sound ridiculous, and yet this is exactly what composition students are doing all the time. They decide “I’m going to write a piece of music” and sit down at their keyboard or DAW. After noodling around for however long it takes, they end up with an idea that seems interesting and flesh it out into 8 to 16 bars of music. Usually, at this point, they’ve chosen a virtual instrument and have started tweaking with the presets on their patch. Then they add other parts: chords, drums, bass lines, counter-lines, cymbal swells, etc. Over and over they go, rewriting, looping, EQing, compressing, adding reverb, and vertically enhancing the same opening bars of music until it sounds gorgeous.
Full, epic, and complete, these thirty seconds of music are sounding great! But then they reach a point where they can’t possibly squeeze anything more out of this opening material; it’s time to move on but… now they are stuck. Partly because they’re tired of their own idea after so many listenings, but usually also because they’ve written themselves into a corner (usually by achieving such a full sound that there’s no more room to go anywhere).
Over many years of teaching composition, I don’t think I’ve had a student without some version of this situation: “I have no problem coming up with ideas, but then I don’t know what to do with them. I can get about thirty seconds to a minute of something that I love and is really kicking ass, but then I become stuck. Coming up with ideas is no big deal, but I don’t know what to do next!”
After hearing similar stories over and over, I’m fascinated by how common this problem is. There are a variety of different tips and techniques that can help composers get past this roadblock, but it really all begins with how they approach the writing process in the first place.
You have a writing process, whether or not it’s an intentional one. Is your writing process one that actually makes sense, and allows you to write a fully thought out piece of music? Or are you writing and rewriting the same 8 bars of music before you even know if you’re writing a prelude or a symphony?
To me, this is like writing the opening lines of a book before you’ve even decided if it’s going to be fiction or nonfiction. Or painting every detail of the corner of a painting before deciding what’s going to fill the majority of the frame. That would be absurd. At the very least, an author decides they are going to write a short story, or a novel, or a poem before they get started. An artist knows they are going for a landscape, a portrait, a scene. Even an abstract artist knows they are going for expression, color, shape, etc. before they start working.
Take an honest look at your own working procedures and decide what parts are serving you and what parts are holding you back. If you are having a hard time writing longer pieces, developing your ideas, and expanding your forms beyond an opening melody, most likely your writing process is to blame.
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