When I’m working on a song, I try to write down everything that comes to my mind.  When the voice in my head says, ‘That’s stupid’ or, ‘That stinks’, I try to ignore that voice.  But not because it’s wrong.  I ignore it because, as John Cleese said, “Any drivel can lead to the breakthrough”.

In fact, that voice is usually right.  But I have to write my way through the bad stuff to get to the good (or at least usable) stuff.  So I try to ignore that voice.

Sometimes, in my head, it’s my Internal Editor’s voice; rigorous and exacting… I can use that part of my brain, but later, after I’ve spilled out the ideas.

Sometimes it’s the voice in my head that wants to tear me down, to stop me from creating… I wish that voice wasn’t there, but it is (though it’s quieter than it used to be).

Writing is like panning for gold.  You just have to keep reaching down into the river.  Or like digging for oil.  You have to keep drilling into the ground, even when you come up dry.  If you come up with nothing; that’s OK, that’s the nature of the beast… You reach down again… and again… eventually something usable comes up.  Sometimes it’s a trickle, sometimes a gusher.  You take what you get, nurture it, try to build on it…

To switch metaphors (and not for the last time), every song is something custom-made.  It’s not off-the-rack, even though it may share many structural similarities with other items of its type.  So previous experience may help solve the problems presented by a particular idea, but it only takes you so far.  Any creative idea presents its own set of specific challenges that must be brought to some kind of unity, some sense of rightness, of proportion (not perfection) for it to work, to live.

That grappling is the challenge of it… and actually the fun of it.  Solving the ‘problem’ is not just where the frustration is, it’s where the joy is too.

Not having found something ‘good’ (yet) when writing…  that’s a ‘problem’ in the same way that a mountain climber trying to get from one ledge to the next one above has a ‘problem’.  Yes, he or she does, but solving that problem is the whole reason they’re on the mountain in the first place – it’s fun, it’s a challenge, it’s exhilarating, they feel particularly alive… and often it’s not easy.  And that’s good!

If it was always easy, everyone would write songs.  Why?  Because, as Akira Kurosawa said, ‘it is wonderful to create’.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VShmtsLhkQg