Five Writing Exercises from Jeff Tweedy's "How to Write One Song"

link from Austin Kleon

 

Start Writing: The Music of Words

Exercise #1: Word Ladder - Verbs and Nouns

1. Make a list of ten verbs related to some profession. (He uses a physician, I used a construction worker.)
2. Write down ten nouns within your field of vision.
3. Connect the words that don’t usually go together.

I like to use this exercise not so much to generate a set of lyrics but to remind myself of how much fun I can have with words when I’m not concerning myself with meaning or judging my poetic abilities…. I find it almost always works when I’m feeling a need to break out of my normal, well-worn paths of language. 

Exercise #2: Stealing Words from a Book

Think of a melody.  Open up a book anywhere and keep humming the melody to yourself.  Words will jump out and attach themselves to the melody.  Highlight (literally, with a highlighter, if you can) those words, and keep moving until you've collected a cache or words that potentially sound right in the context of your melody....  I like this exercise a lot because it puts my ego securley in the backseat, far away from the steering wheel, and forces me to surrender to a process that puts landguage/words in front of my creative path, and I'm free to find them as though they've come from somewhere else.  So I feel mroe free to react with surprise and passion or cold indifference than I am able to when my intellect begins treating my lyrical ideas like precious jewels. You can find a "anchor word" and then search "catastrophe + rhymes" online).  You might develop a little story.

Exercise #3: Cut-Up Technique

Exactly what it sounds like.  You can do it word for word or phrase for phase.  Also suggests that you should rearrange lines in more finished pieces.  

I honestly believe that making the decision to open yourself up to what might be within your work that isn't completely intentional is a brace act of acceptance adn every bit as revealing and artful as any art that claims to be a fully realized vision.

Exercise #4: Word Ladder Variation -- the Dreaded Adjective

Make a list of ten adjectives related to outer space set against ten nouns that just popped into my head.  Connect like in exercise #1.  

Whenever I do one of these exercises, I'm reminded how much beauty we have at our fingertips and how creating doesn't always mean that you have to cast yourself as the creator.  In these cases I feel more like I'm participating in an activity that reveals my creative nature, that uncovers the hidden desire for there to be more meaning - the powerful longing I have for things to exist that I wasn't aware of.  Or seen the beauty that I witnessed being born.

10 adjectives (related to outer space: circular, distant, ancient, haloed, cold, vast, bright, frozen, silent, infinite) 10 nouns (ladder, kids, daughter, hand, pool, summer, lawn, friend, blaze, window);  poem that comes out: there is a distant hand/ on a frozen ladder/ climbing through/ a bright window/ a vast pool waiting/ beside a silent lawn / where a daughter haloed/ lives a circular summer/ one cold kiss/ from an infinite friend/ away from an ancient blaze)

Exercise #5: Have a Conversation

Record, transcribe and find lines in conversations - normal or passionate ones.  He gives the example from the song Guaranteed.

Exercise #6: Playing with Rhymes

write just "freestanding couplets"  - just take two rhyming words and connecting them.  When Gwendolyn speaks to a county police/plastic cup of beer held between her teeth.

Exercise #7: Don't Be Yourself

"Forget the Flowers" on Being There is written in the voice of Johnny Cash.  He also speaks about writing "Company in My Back" "written from the viewpoint of an insect at a picnic." I posted something more about that here.

Pieces of Music: Start to Make Things

Recommendation #1: Learn Other People's Songs

Apprenticeships and oral traditions are a consistent part of many arts and crafts.  But how do you watch someone write a song?First, you listen.  Maybe you read the lyrics or try to play some of the notes yourself.  But if you really want to get into the mind-set of a song-writer, you should learn other people's songs seriously and thoroughly. Tons of them.  And don't stop.... Ideally, learning a song well enough that you can perform it by yourself is what I think is the most helpful.  But even being able to confidently sing along without looking at a lyric sheet is valuable if you want ato get a sense of how songs are paced and why certain song shapes are recurring and satisfying.  I still take time to learn and relaern my favorite songs on a daily basis.  I also spend a good deal of time listening to new records, and old records I've never heard before, in an ongoing sedarch for songs that inspire me to write my own.  A big part of that inspiration comes through the process of taking them apart enough to figure out how to play them on an acoustic guitar and sing them to myself.

Recommendation #2: Set a Timer

I have a favorite game I play to not just combat procrastination but also challenge the feeling that I should work only when I know it's going to be "good."  This exercise helps keep my definition of what a song is, or can be, open and forgiving enough to allow pleasant anomalies to flourish.  It's a simple game.  Basically, the whole gist is to set a timer for any amount of time you can spare (I think five to ten minutes is perfect) and tell yourself that whatever comes to you in that amount of time is a song.  I even like to record what I come up with into my phone at the end of the time limit to really finalize the feeling that I met the challenge and stuck to the rules.  

Recommendation #3: Loosen Your Judgment

Learn to improvise a bit.  This is going to be and adjustment, especially for people who already respond well to order adn structure.  but it's worth it.  so bang on a table and blurt out something primal.  Play one chord an narratoe your day so far.  Just put something into a recorder.  You've created something that didn't exist before -- how freeing is that?

The important element here is that you find someway to sidestep the part of your brain that wants perfection or needs to be rewarded right away with a 'creation' that it dems 'good' -- something that supports an ideal vision of yourself as someone who's serious and smart and accomplished.  Basically, you have to learn how to have a party and not invite any part of your psyche that feels a need to judge what you make as a reflection of you.  Or more accurately, the part of you that cannot tolerate any outward expression that might be flawed.

Recommendation #4: Steal

Steal chord progressions (says he got 3 songs from studying chord changes from Weyes blood "Andromeda"