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Today was my last day in London, and I had lunch with my brilliant friend Sarah Gillespie, highly acclaimed songwriter and musician. Here’s a link to my favorite song of hers, “Signal Failure,” recorded in the studio of “Art of the Song” in New Mexico a few years ago, with me there listening. (Usually she has at least a three- or four-piece band.)
As well as performing at top clubs and festivals around Europe, Sarah also mentors women songwriters and musicians. So we started talking about writing, and how we both help people who think they can’t write access their own creative imagination. Her approach is very similar to our “write what you don’t know.”
Read about how to write a novel or a memoir, and most sources will tell you to make an outline, develop your themes, and so on. Read about how to write a song, and the sources will say something similar: decide on your theme, get your chorus and build out from there. It’s not really surprising that the how-to’s are all about planning, because that’s a much easier way to write a how-to. Problem is, it’s not the easiest way to build a strong story or a strong song—at least, not for people who are doing it for the first time or aren’t the churn-it-out type.
Sarah said, do any of us think Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell take that approach? And if you’ve read Write What You Don’t Know, you might remember Barbara Kingsolver’s remark: “I have to write 300 pages before I get to page 1.”
I’d been a book editor for 20 years when I began work on my memoir Love Child, and despite all that experience I couldn’t create an outline that I believed in, or articulate what my themes were beyond the one flag I wanted to fly: that families aren’t defined by DNA. Other themes, like becoming the central character in your own life and the fickleness of memory, only became clear to me after the book was published.
Sarah says the same: that often she doesn’t really know what her songs are about until after they’re written.
If you haven’t already built up confidence in your writing, working from your rational mind usually leads to frustration and self-doubt and “writer’s block.” You think you’re supposed to do it a certain way, and if the results seem stiff or bland, that must be a reflection of you. Evidently, you’re just not a good writer—which is simply not true. The only thing that’s evident is that the rational-mind how-to approach isn’t working for you.
Sarah’s approach is intuitive and imaginative, just like ours. Two of her mentees, a woman in her sixties and a woman in her seventies, have just released their first albums. Like Navé and me, she’s delighted and energized by helping people who have always wanted to create, actually create. It’s not about some external measure of success: the reward is the feeling of fulfillment in self-expression that everyone deserves to feel. And, that everyone can achieve, in one medium or another, despite what many of us have been told.
Sarah and I have been talking for years about doing a workshop together, or perhaps back-to-back. If you’re interested in exploring songwriting, let me know.
Nothing worse than a blank page!
Any words are better than none.
Ciarán