If you are engaged in the creative process then you have probably figured out by now what a messy, irrational, and wholly inconvenient thing it is. You finally have unfettered time to sit down and work on Your Project at last? That is the very moment, staring at the blank page, that your mind will also be blank, and nothing will come from your fingers to the keys.
I have been there so many times. Especially as a person who is now blogging on a regular schedule on a few different sites. So many times these past months I have opened up the page to get my work done and … nothing. Just nothing.
Worse than this, there are so many moments each week when, unbidden, an idea will come to me. It will feel so solid, and so complete, and I will smile and say, oh yes, this is what I will write about when the time comes. Then the time comes and the idea is completely gone.
This is by no means a new problem, either. But over the years, I have come up with (and let’s be honest, I have also stolen) a tactic or two for making the process less dire.
From 1994 until 2006 I was a performing singer-songwriter around the southeast, working mainly out of Atlanta and Nashville. I know everyone who is a songwriter approaches the craft a little differently, so take what I am about to say with a grain of salt, because maybe your process will be different, or maybe if you talk to other songwriters, their process will be different, but this is what worked for me.
Basically, it was very rare indeed to have a time when I got words and music to a song all at once. Instead, I would find that I could at times turn on the tape recorder (because back then it was a tape recorder) and get some really good melodies and instrumental ideas down. I would get into a flow, and the tape would capture what I needed.
Other times, I would get myself into a good space with language. Maybe I was fresh back from an art exhibit, or I had an emotional interaction with a friend or lover, and it would cause an overflow of images and thoughts. At these times, I would get out paper and pen and do what I could to stay in that flow as long as I could, to capture as much as I could.
And by ‘capture’ I don’t mean necessarily linear or coherent ideas. It would just be piles of lines, sometimes. The thoughts might be disconnected, but they would be full of energy because they were fresh.
After a couple years of doing this, the fragments became quite a pile. I kept them in a fat file folder labeled WORD HORDE.
This phrase, word horde, is not original to me. It comes from a book by William S. Burroughs called Naked Lunch. I really like that book (even though it is a bit disturbing) because of the very free way Burroughs approached language and composition. Burroughs worked not on the ‘creative process,’ but rather on getting himself out of the way of the creative force that he believed was always at work in the world.
So, as a result, Burroughs would gather inspiration from anything. He would slice up newspapers into strips and recombine them to find interesting combinations of words and ideas, and these would become the basis of his writings—often with very little editorial filter.
(I learned later that the musician David Bowie often used a similar process, which explains some of his songs like “Ricochet” off Let’s Dance.)
So, for me, having this big pile of emotion-laden fragments and poetic ideas was very useful. I would find myself working on a groovy melodic idea, and instead of trying to come up with words on the spot, I would go to the Word Horde and start sifting through ideas.
Often, it wouldn’t be a set of words that would grab me, but rather it would be a mood. The music would make me feel a certain way, and I would start to look for similar imagery in the words I was sifting through in the pile.
Other times, the Word Horde fragments would not make it into the song itself, but something I would find in the pile would catapult me into a headspace where I could write the song more or less from scratch (but not really ‘from scratch,’ as I have shown).
This process worked for me for years, and I know its value. That’s why—now that my forms of expression is more essay format than song format—I find I am having to re-learn the lesson all over again. What I should be doing is grabbing phrases and ideas all through the week, so that when I sit down to write, I already have something in the pipeline.
What I am discovering, however, is that I somehow think my essay-writing process must be qualitatively different than my songwriting process. It isn’t different, but I feel like it is.
So ideas are still created through the week, as they were before. I’m just not as good at grabbing them and putting them into a pile.
Thankfully, though, that’s changing a bit. Today I had a great idea for an essay for next week’s Walking the Wire column. As I type this, I cannot for the life of me remember what it is (I know, right?)—but when I had the idea, I opened up my ToDoIst app, and put the rough idea (a title and the sketch of the first few lines) in there. So when it comes time next week to write the thing, I am not starting from scratch.
So I hope this post encourages you. It does not have to be a linear process. You can find your way forward with asynchronous creativity. Grab your ideas when they come, and combine the elements later.
Start your Word Horde.