Musicians can get writers block. I get it all the time, especially leading up to a deadline (like now). Common symptoms include:
- Repeatedly playing Stairway to Heaven or Nothing Else Matters on the guitar for no apparent reason.
- Listening over and over to previous work just so you can pick out every single little mistake.
- Listening to your favourite songs over and over, picking out all the clever bits that are so much better than your own work
- Drinking Coffee and eating Toast.
- Doing housework, running errands, catching up on paperwork, blogging…
The worst thing is when you can think of a hundred things to write a song about – but none of it just seems any good. My current ideas involve sick frogs, the IRD, and mismatched socks.
The other worst thing is when you give up on what you’re writing a song about and just try to come up with some good music and/or riffs. When you have writers block, everything always sounds too much like something else. Sometimes, it all just sounds crap. Sometime it doesn’t sound like anything because you can’t even come up with anything.
Cures for writers/composers block:
- Actually having feelings or opinions to write about. (Rumour has it you can get these by giving a damn – harder than it looks sometimes)
- Being almost at the deadline… and dropping your standards to write about things you originally thought were crap when you had a lot of time to think about it.
- Finding God (Christian bands NEVER run out of things to write about
) - Harnessing random fluctuations in the Time Space Continuum. (eg, open any random book at a random page and randomly point at something on the page and write about whatever that’s about. Also works quite well with like dream cards, the random button on wikipedia, or even your media player set to random. [I secretly suspect all those Christian bands just write songs by doing this with the bible!])
- Doing housework, running errands, catching up on paperwork, blogging… Sometimes stopping trying to compose and doing something else for a little while can give your brain a little time to stew things over and come up with some proper ideas.
I think I’m ready to get back to work now 
