The fresh ideas
Not everything you create has to be precious. (The British Library)
The other day, I wrote a song from scratch.
The music for the verses took about 90 seconds to compose. Then, the bridge took another 5 minutes. The lyrics, on the other hand, took another 90 minutes, and then I tinkered with them over the next day or so, changing “it” to “that” and “eventually” to “actually.” But the song was essentially done in one sitting.
It was incredibly satisfying to create something from nothing. I used to labor for days or weeks or even years over a song, hesitant to commit to completing something if it wasn’t perfect. As a result, I have a bank of song ideas and fragments going back all the way to high school.
However, when I sit down to write a song, I tend to ignore those. The fresh ideas are the ones I’m most interested in.
I do the same thing when I write articles for this blog. Yes, I’ve got pages and pages of ideas and half-formed posts, but when it comes down to it, it’s easier to start with something new.
I wouldn’t say that I’m lazy, exactly, but I’m always seeking a sense of ease in my work. It may take me 90 minutes to write a handful of words, but I’m not experiencing frustration during that time. Rather, I’m in a state of flow in which that time seems to pass quickly.
Going back to unearth an old idea doesn’t necessarily contribute to that flow. Feeling a sense of obligation definitely doesn’t help. I allow myself to build on whatever comes up in a given writing session, never forcing.
When it comes down to it, there’s nothing sacred about the ideas that have come before. If I wasn’t compelled to use them in the past, the likelihood of me wanting to use them now seems slim. I’m grateful to my past self for whatever gems I might discover in the archives, but the provenance is not important to the finished product. I’m allowed to just pick something fresh and new and go with it.
Occasionally, there are some interesting collaborations between the me of now and the me of before. I once sat down to write a song based on a book I was reading and ended up pulling a melody that I had originally composed ten years before while standing on a beach watching a young relative play in the waves. I never would have imagined that I’d end up setting that melody to lyrics about a disagreement over the plans for the Panama Canal. But that’s the whole point: it would have been counterproductive to try to force completion of this song. When I finally found the right marriage of melody and subject matter, the work went quickly.
Though I still record ideas and sometimes can even be found taking notes on things, I have learned to trust that the flow of knowledge and information will never end. Therefore, I don’t need to capture it all. I can just let it keep coursing by and dip my bucket into the stream whenever I need to. It seems to me that the best ideas come back around—and go by as many times as they need to until they get my attention.
Part of the fun of this blog is that I never know what I’m going to come up with in my daily writing time. Sometimes it takes ten or twenty or even thirty minutes of poking around in my idea list or staring at a blank page before I come up with something. But when I finally start composing an article, it often surprises me. Often, it is not at all what I expected to write when I sat down. It may be related to a previous idea, but usually the connection, if it exists, is a bit oblique, like the idea was to write about something green and I decided to write about something blue instead. Who knows where these things come from.
If you are struggling to manage a creative process, my best advice is to stop trying to manage it. Let go of the belief that your ideas have to be realized or even recorded. Trust that you will have what you need, when you need it. There is no shortcut to doing the work, but the work doesn’t have to be a grind. It can actually go along pretty nicely if you let it, with a nice fresh idea that represents not your past, but your future. What will you create today?
