A few years ago, a friend of mine lent me a book with an uninteresting, if not annoying title: Frustrated Songwriter's Handbook: A Radical Guide to Cutting Loose, Overcoming Blocks, and Writing the Best Songs of Your Life It is actually a really good book to read if, like me, procrastination and self-doubt are your biggest problems (and you're able to ignore some of the more, shall we say 'Californian' elements to the book.
In essence it describes an approach to making music that involves setting aside a 12 hour period, during which you try to write and record 20 pieces of music! It does not matter if you reach this amount, but you must aim to produce as many as you can. Although the book is aimed at 'songwriters', the theory can be used for any type of music (I dare say, it would stretch to anything creative), and is a kind of sledgehammer approach to breaking creative block.
The reason for describing this book is that I did one of these IMM (Immersion Music Method - I know! Wanky title) sessions yesterday. I managed to write 9 pieces (which is about usual for me). I feel that this approach is such an excellent way of getting ideas. You have to almost switch off the analytical side of your brain, and just record stuff, but as a result you try things that perhaps under normal circumstances, would not arise. It is also important to forget any notion of whether what you're doing is any good (at least for those 12 hours): an action which counter-intuitively often means you produce good work. It is such an emotional journey that you experience during those 12 hours, and at the end of it, you have a large number of pieces to work with.
So far, I have only done this IMM thing about once a year, but I really want to find a way of upping the ante for myself, in a way that will not set me up to fall (it is all very well to say that I will do 1 a week, or whatever, but how do I stick to it?). I also want to decide a method of putting these things online (do I make a video for each one? Do I set aside a different 12 hours in which I must record these videos? Do I just put them on Myspace? etc.).
In theory, I am thinking that I will try to do an IMM about once a fortnight-ish, and have provisionally pencilled in dates in my calendar, but I guess writing this, and in theory having it read by anything up to 2 people, is an opportunity to make it more official in my head.
If you have any thoughts about this, or suggestions, or...anything to do with creative block, that'd be really cool. I really didn't plan to write on this blog (as I am not a writer), but... hey ho. I will endeavour to put some stuff up here from these sessions, but they obviously have a certain quality to them, as they are created in such a short space of time, so I need to present them in such a way that this is taken into consideration.
Anyway.... To Be Continued...
Ed
