These days, blogs aside, I am trying, once more, to write songs. I've been a musician for over thirty years now, and I've been trying to write, off and on, pretty much since day one, in bands and on my own. Typically, I have let myself become distracted or disinterested, and most writing sessions devolved in to "jam" sessions. The muse would lose interest, as the critic whispered in my ear, and all too soon. Meanwhile, I like to think, the songs kept right on brewing and churning, waiting for their moment. I won't go in to the detail of my renewed enthusiasm right now. Just suffice it to say that I have several in the works right now. I am trying to dig deep to conquer my ever-present "left brain" tendencies when they surface far, far too early in the process. [*] Anyway, even Lennon and McCartney would have finished nary a single if they had not learned to tune out their critical sense during the initial, "roughing it out" stages. Let that happen too soon and you kill a song (or a story, or a novel, etc..) before it ever had a chance. Paul McCartney's "Yesterday" started out as a song about scrambled eggs. Note the syllabic equivalence. He needed a vocal melody to fit with the beautiful guitar parts his muse had inspired, and what a great melody he arrived at. Try it: "Yesterday, all my troubles...", only instead sing "Scrambled eggs, in the skillet seem so...". Yep, true story, no lies. The point: these legends-to-be knew (probably instinctively) that in order to let creativity really flow, you have to totally shut off the inner critic until you have a bunch of material (lyric, melodies, a strong framework). If you whittle material during the building phase, you are almost certain to wind up with nothing, and with just a memory of that beautiful muse which sparked the idea to begin with. It is very difficult to turn off the inner critic, especially early on in one's life as a writer, when confidence is usually fleeting, and shaky at best. It is also imperative, in my humble opinion. Leave the critic outside and hidden away, until you've really entertained, wined, and dined that beautiful muse for as long as she'll endure your company. If you must, remind yourself that you'll hack and slash at the bad stuff later on, that you need to get it all out right now, no matter how ridiculous (I know for a fact that many of the greatest lyrics ever written had some embarrassingly bad lines within them early on). Get that song, that paragraph, written, while she's still with you. When on a roll, ideally, you don't want to slow down even to contemplate; that's almost certainly the critic trying to sneak in and "fix", way too soon, and he'll mess you up if you let him.
You may have noticed that I envision my muse as a feminine, probably sexy, "angelic" sort-of presence. Yours may vary ;-) I guess I imagine the inner critic in the form of a grade-school teacher who criticized quickly, discouraged often, and forbade original thought.
While I believe I was mostly able to keep my left brain at a distance during the above discourse, it occurs to me that my right brain may well have joined him there.
As Homer says, "Doh!".
[*] "Left" and "Right" brain, it turns out, aren't nearly as simple as we once thought, but we still often use the terms to represent two different ways of thinking, of being - critical, logical, analytical from the left, and creative, symbolic, "unbridled" from the right. So, no neuroscience corrections needed, thank you :)