Rough to Release

The day job has intruded a bit this week (to the extent that it's been a bit of a night job too) so to keep you all sweet without having to think too hard myself I have an out-of-sequence piece for exactly this occasion. So next week we'll return to story arcs and tension and release but in the meantime here are my dozen tips to tackle writer's block: 1) Take yourself somewhere different. Go for a walk, find a different cafe, jump on a tourist bus tour... Anything to mix up your environment. Make notes about who you see and how people behave. 2) Grab a copy of a good newspaper, something that does proper reporting not just celebrity gossip, and read through the stories. Look for themes or jarring inconsistencies. Who's writing the stories? Who's reading them? What are the personal stories behind the writers and readers? 3) Find a nice quiet room you know well, and really study it. The floorboards, the ceiling rose, the decoration. Who might have lived here before? W...

Let's talk about story arcs and having something to say. A story arc is basically just a fancy way of saying the 'beginning, middle and end' that you're familiar with from creative writing at school. You'll often encounter it as the 'three-act-play' structure that forms the core of most plays and movies.  The first act sets up the story: our hero, their life and, at the end of act, the change that upsets the normal. The second act then introduces all the fall out from the change, the difficulties that our hero* has to battle with and frequently ends with all seeming lost and the low point of the story. The third act then deals with the our hero overcoming the challenges, frequently both internal and external, some form of learning and redemption and then happily ever after. That's an approach that has kept story tellers of all kinds in business for literally thousands of years. Now I'm not remotely suggesting that you need to build this in...

  Right, let's crack on. The first thing we're going to look at today is moving beyond the bounds and structures of verse and chorus. We'll start here for a couple of reasons, partly because these are often the bits we come up with first when writing, along with a riff or melody line, and - relatedly - because these are the foundations of modern song.  When songs were mostly memorised and shared in pubs and houses, a simple verse-chorus structure told everyone when to join in, when to shut up, and gave a natural breathing cycle to the song; a bit of tension, then release. We're no longer bound by those limitations, but it's important to understand how we can use those natural story-telling tools when we move beyond that simple structure. And that throws in my first 'gotcha' - which is: do we need to move beyond a simple verse-chorus structure?  Of course not. Sometimes that's all you need. But if you rely on that for every song then you...

  Obviously not every song is a love song, but the same principles we discussed last time apply. Take the spark and add narrative spice. In A Prologue , I have a song that features a killer on a journey to dispose of a dead body in the back seat of his car. Ok, that's an idea, but I like to think it becomes interesting by adding the spice that the killer has no memory of how this morbid situation came to pass.   An easy way of finding a bit of spice to add to a song is to grab that folder of notes, or stack of videos and grab a couple of examples at random. Maybe one idea is a riff on train travel and the other idea is about gardening. Great, how could you combine them into something that fires the imagination? What about looking out of a train window and seeing how a garden changes over the seasons? Ok, that gives us a nice time-passing idea. What else is in the folder? Perhaps it's a rant about quitting work. Fine, that gives us the impetus for change. Is it a song a...