Chekov said, "The thought that I ought to write, that I must write never leaves me for an instant." L'Engle talks about it, and then references Rainer Marie Rilke to say the writer must craft his/her life around this necessity. Tricky, huh? Gotta make money, right? Gotta take care of all the other stuff. But if you look for it, you DO have time, no matter what. We tend to do what we want to do, and the artist must make sacrifices sometimes. Big bad awful sacrifices, like less TV, or less social time. The cool thing about writing songs is that once you get one going in your heart and mind, you can be "working on it" to some extent throughout many of your other activities. So people will think you're zoned out and weird - it goes with the territory. We're not really zoned out or weird (well, maybe a little), but it that's what they need to think in order for us to get a little creative space, then so be it.
3 comments:
Time. We all say that we don’t have enough of it yet we waste much of it. Including me. Prioritizing and knowing what needs care is hard and requires more effort than I would like to give, yet once I take care of it I feel so much better. Arranging my life to incorporate songwriting is difficult. There are so many distractions during the school year with homework and papers and such that it can be difficult to plan time to write. What helps me focus is completely separating myself from everyone else with just my guitar and notebook and just spend an hour or two just brainstorming and writing. This way, there’s nothing that will distract me and I can discipline myself to concentrate on writing.
Priorities are needed in order to accomplish daily tasks. When we are constantly losing focus on what matters most, we lose out on all of our potential. If I was to set aside just 1-2 hours a day for songwriting, my growth would skyrocket from where I'm at now. I should continually be writing throughout my day and using objects around me to inspire me. I must immerse myself into the world of creativity. Too often, I am playing video games, socializing, worrying about my future, and I leave no time for my true passion of songwriting. I am letting resistance take over and I need to stand my ground.
Sean Kilpattick
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“THE ZONE”!
The line that immediately stood out to me was "The cool thing about writing songs is that once
you get one going in your heart and mind, you can be "working on it" to some extent throughout
many of your other activities." Everyone knows that writing a song is a process. I've never
known a writer who knows exactly what they want to say, exactly the music to convey their
message, and exactly the words to use before they write a song. At least to me, it comes in
steps, and some steps take longer and need to sit around for a while. Sometimes its a lyric, or a
melody that escapes you and can be discovered only with time. After all, to cram anything and
everything floating around in your head into a song in 20 minutes is not writing, but to me it's
just completing an assignment. I never want to look at writing a song in that way, and I hope my
classmates don't either. Writing should take as much time as it needs to.
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