Overcoming Writer’s Block as a Composer

What's up, composers?

In this blog, I'm going to be talking about overcoming composer’s block. Now, this may not be like the magic bullet of a blog that's going to help you to get unstuck, but I hope that it can be helpful for you if you're experiencing a block right now, or if you're having low levels of creativity lately--I hope that this can give you some golden nuggets on how you can break through this and get unstuck.

So, what do we do when we get stuck?

Sooner or later, every composer artist writer gets to this phase where you can't get past some kind of block. It has happened to millions and millions of artists since the beginning of the human race.

If you're aware of the commonness of this experience, this phenomenon that happens to composers and artists and people of creative backgrounds, then that might make it less scary, because fear is actually what gives power to the block. The more that you obsess about it, or the more that you get frustrated by it, the harder it is to actually get past it.

It's sort of like quicksand, right? I've never experienced what it feels like to be in quicksand, but I imagine that the more that you move, the harder that you thrash around and try to escape, the faster you're going to sink. It could be true about swimming too. We have to learn to be patient and relax through these blocks so that we can allow the energy of our creativity to flow.

Reasons You May Feel Blocked

#1

One reason that you might feel blocked is that you may just not have the tools that you need to actually write the piece that you're trying to write. The solution is basically just to acquire those tools. This could just be a matter of analyzing what it is that you're doing and trying to look objectively at what it is that you're not able to do and try to inform the process by acquiring those tools. 

It's just like if a woodworker is going to make a birdhouse or whatever and they don't have a hammer—it's going to be really hard to nail the pieces together, right? If they try to use some other tool, it's too it's going to fail to get the end result in the way that they want to do it.

And so in our case, maybe there's some particular technique that you're missing and maybe you're not even sure what that technique is. If you don't know what tools you need, then the solution is to seek out guidance from a composition mentor who can help you to identify areas that you can strengthen through practice and study.

#2

You're worried about what others think about the idea, and this is just tied to your ego. The solution that I have found is to let go of the results and just trust the process.

The results are a byproduct of trusting the process, so we have to think more about it as we would if we were taking care of plants: as long as we're optimizing the conditions for a plant to grow, then it's going to grow. As long as you're giving it sunlight and you're giving it water, then we don't really have to worry about the results.

It's the same thing with music, so don't get too tied to the results. Don't tie your ego and the value of what you're doing to what others are going to think about it, because that might actually be what's blocking you. You have to let go, detach from your ego, detach from the results and let the process be. Just give it time. Give it attention. As long as you're doing those things, your piece is going to grow.

#3

Another reason that I've encountered in my own music and that I've seen in others work, is you may be too attached to a particular idea. Sometimes we are so attached to a certain sound, a certain melodic idea, a certain pattern, rhythmically, that it sort of bottlenecks the entire compositional process, and it sort of becomes this narrow point where everything else has to fit through, but other ideas are not compatible with it. But that's the thing that we love the most, and we become so attached to it. We become so determined to make it work that it ends up being this completely isolated thing, and the piece doesn't really thrive because you haven't yet found the right context for that particular idea to work.

The solution that I have found is just trust your instinct and maybe leave this idea in your literal or metaphorical drawer for the future so that you can continue to work on it and develop it subconsciously and consciously in different pieces or just in a future work. Don't let it bottleneck your current project to the point where you can't write anything else around it.

You may currently be lacking the skills that you need to be able to make it work. The solution may be to just write other pieces, gain those skills, and maybe 5 or 10 pieces from now, that idea is going to be ready.

#4

We stop listening to music. We stop watching great films. We stop going to the theater. We stop seeing great art in general. That may mean that your well of information that informs our creativity is empty and you need to refill it. If you're not feeling inspired just go look at some art. Go read your favorite book, go read a new book, listen to some new music. Listen to your favorite composers. Listen to a piece of theirs that you've never heard before, or go to a museum. Do something that refills this creativity well.

#5

Another thing that can happen, which sometimes we're not willing to admit, is you might be stuck because you're bored. The idea may not have the same magic that it used to. It could be that your bottlenecking the process by a certain idea, because you think this idea is so great, but after a certain period of time, we lose interest in the idea without realizing it, because we're just trying so hard to make it work.

The solution may just be move on. Think of something else. Write a different piece for now. Come back to it when it's interesting again. Or if it's just not interesting anymore, abandon the idea. There's no need to get stuck thinking about this thing if it no longer even interests you musically.

This is normal. 

It could also be that this is the reason that you don't finish pieces: you get excited about an idea. You write like the first 75% of the piece, and then by the last 25%, you've already lost interest and you can't finish it. That's a different problem.

But if it's just that you don't compose anymore because this idea is so boring, then just move on, write something else. It's fine. Don't worry about it. When you work on something new, it might actually provide the insight into how to get unstuck in that thing, and it will no longer be boring because you will have paired new elements which give it new life.

Recommendations:

#1

Don't get too attached to any one piece that you're working on, or any one piece that you've composed in the past, because if you think that, “oh, this is my best piece, and every piece that I write must live up to that piece,” then it's going to create these impossible expectations of yourself that you're going to impose every time you write a piece, and it's not going to let you grow or experiment in different directions, because you're going to think that if it's not as good as that piece—which is super subjective anyway, you may actually feel like three years from now, that piece is not that good)—if you're constantly using that as the benchmark for how good a piece is supposed to be, it may not actually allow you to breathe as a composer.

I've experienced this myself where I think I have to write it every single piece at that level. Sometimes pieces just need to be written because you need to learn something, and then you can throw them away and that's totally fine. So again, it's really important to detach from the results. Detach from your ego.

Most importantly, when these pieces become the benchmark of “quality,” it doesn't give you room to fail. Failure is often very stigmatized in our modern culture, but for artists, it's super important that we learn from our mistakes, because this is what's going to help us to establish what our voice is a composer. When you fail at accomplishing something in a piece of music, it might be because you just don't feel connected to it, and you feel a little bit alienated from the idea. Maybe you failed to capture an idea that was magical to you.  

That could happen, or it could just be a way to learn how to do something more efficiently to execute a particular idea, because you gain certain new techniques when writing that piece. So, we need failure to actually be able to grow, and if you stigmatize it because you have this constant benchmark, then your music is not going to go in any new direction, and you're constantly going to be rewriting the same piece, which is going to contribute to the block rather than break through it.

#2

I would also highly recommend that you're working consistently, because consistency is sometimes better than relying on motivation or inspiration. One of the things that's going to happen with consistency is you are going to develop a habit that starts to feel necessary for your daily routine. In doing so, you will become more efficient in doing a lot of different things compositionally.

You're going to be more skilled when inspiration and motivation are actually there. I learned this concept from a few different sources, different creative celebrity types. For example, Jerry Seinfeld was one of the people who talks about creativity and the consistency of creativity.

He will sit down every single day for a period of time, and he will establish what the time frame is. Then he will work on his jokes, and his motto is to “never break the chain.” The chain created by working every single day. If you break the chain by skipping a day, then jump back on as soon as you can, because as soon as you do two days in a row without writing jokes, working on your music, writing, whatever it is that you do creatively, then you're starting to establish a new habit of not doing that thing, and then it can easily become three days, four days, five days a month, two years without you really having any control over it. 

If you skip a day, get back on as soon as you can. Consistency is key.

#3

Think quantity over quality, because eventually quantity is going to yield quality.

The reason that I believe this is because there was a famous anecdote from a photography professor who did an experiment in one of his classes. One half of the class was tasked with taking 100 pictures, and that would be the way that they get an A, and the other half of the class had to do one single picture in the entire semester, and that picture had to be absolutely spectacular, stellar, the most beautiful thing that they could possibly produce, and they would be graded based on the quality.

What the teacher realized after conducting this experiment was that there were far better pictures in the group that did 100 than the ones that did 1.

What happens when you only have one opportunity to actually produce a spectacular piece of art is you get sort of analysis paralysis. You constantly think about, what should I be doing? I don't know if I should do this or that or whatever, and so you sort of get stuck in your head about what you should be doing.

By contrast, the group that did 100 pictures was experimenting a lot. They were thinking, “well, I just have to make 100 pictures. I can fail a lot of the time. Some of these can be garbage, and this will eventually lead me to making a good picture.”  

They were experimenting more with like framing, with composition, with developing techniques in the dark room, with exposure, with F-Stop, you know, photography kind of experiments, and that was what was leading them down the path to making a super high quality picture.

The ones that made just one picture were basically mediocre.

We have to adopt this quantity eventually yields quality in the realm of art.

#4

Another thing that I recommend is always analyze what you've done after that day, and then create a to-do list for the next day so that when you come back the next day, you have a sense of what you're supposed to be doing because you know that the analysis was that you accomplished “this” particular thing, and the music seems to be going in “that” direction now.

“I need to continue ‘that’ trajectory by doing ‘X, Y, and Z.’” 

This has helped me tremendously in the past. Keep a notebook, and it can be a really cheap notebook by the way. I actually recommend that it's a very cheap notebook, because then you're not attached to writing something spectacular about the piece and you're not thinking about posterity, where you tell yourself “oh, musicologists and music theorists are going to be studying this music 100 years from now!” You don't really need to worry about that.

You just need it to guide you through the process, and you can throw it away once you finish or forget about it. It doesn't really matter. The point is just to stay on track and to stay organized.

———-

I hope this blog was helpful for you in figuring out different strategies and mindsets to be able to get unblocked. If you're feeling stuck in your process, these are the things that have really helped me over the years. I anticipate that they will happen to me again, and I will just have different strategies for being able to deal with it.

I'll be more patient. I will be more understanding. I will know that maybe the idea is boring, or maybe the idea is bottlenecking the process, or maybe I'm not being consistent enough. Maybe I'm not taking up enough notes. Maybe I'm not being observant enough, and so at least I have a mental framework to be able to assess what is actually happening that's blocking the process. 

I have strategies for and tools for being able to actually get past it.

I hope that you feel the same way. I'll see you in the next blog.

Happy composing!

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Check out the video I made about Overcoming Composer’s Block 👇🏻

Happy composing!

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