When Is the Best Time To Write?

When is the best time to write?    I think it’s always when the muse strikes you.   You can never tell when that will be so you must be ready for it.   

I know that scheduling a time each day to write is a wonderful way to do it.   The same time and the same place and you sit there; you play things; you read things; you write things down and that way you are right there where the muse can find you.

But what happens if you wake up out of a sleep, or are getting dressed to go to a dinner, or committed to someplace else shortly?

You must follow the muse when she shows up.  

Now I realize that you only have to stand your friends up a few times for you to find yourself without friends, so you need to figure out a way to keep connected to the muse and to keep your commitments.

For melodies, I find that writing down the musical notes is the easiest way to save an idea.   If you don’t write music or don’t have any sheet music, you can use the solfage system (do, re, mi, etc) and give your syllables values if you can (quarter note, half note, etc).   If you can’t do that then use long lines drawn over the syllables to annotate long notes and short lines over the syllables to denote short notes.

Paul McCartney remembered the melody to yesterday by putting it to the lyrics “scrambled eggs, o my god I’m eating scrambled eggs”,   so that is another technique that is obviously successful.   Putting words to a melody, helps to keep the melody fixed in your head.

But you can also still lose the melody if you don’t do something about it soon.     I also keep a cassette recorder (yes, I still have one) with fresh batteries in it so that I can record something at a moments notice.   That way you are sure not to forget it.

A story idea, a song title, a lyric, whatever.    You can just record it into the machine and forget about it.

The bad part is that you actually CAN forget about it, thinking that you’ve gotten it down safely and you can get back to it later.  But later you may not be able to plug into the inspiration that created the idea to begin with, so for me, the best time to work on an idea is as soon as it shows up.

I know that I have scads of tapes with ideas on them that were not followed to their conclusion and some of them are really wonderful.   

My Audi is old enough to have a cassette player in it that works and when I have a long drive I sometimes pile up a bunch of cassettes and take the portable cassette player as well and then listen and either complete the idea or consolidate all the good ideas on to one cassette which becomes the real work cassette.

These techniques work but I think you owe it to yourself and your muse to honor the connection when it shows up.   It doesn’t matter what you are supposed to do (though catching a plane is probably going to trump this idea), put it on hold and follow your muse.

Be late, be remiss, be gone, but be there for the creative spark

Comments

[courtney]

i thought it was 'oh my baby how i love your legs'!