Last year, there was almost no new holiday, Christmas or winter pieces.
After the autumn webinar, I hit a wall. I was exhausted, several crises had happened, I had been sick for weeks, things were ramping up with my kids starting school. And I just didn’t feel like composing holiday music.
This is unusual for me as you know since I love Christmas and the whole holiday season.
So I rested for a few days, took it easy, but it didn’t get any better. There was just too much exhaustion. So I told myself that I was just going to have to put our iconic holiday pieces on sale and call it good.
But that felt awful. It probably would have been fine with all you loyal supporters, but it was not fine with me. I think you know the feeling. When you are meant to compose or meant to teach, not doing so feels like defeat.
You feel empty when you aren’t doing what you love doing. Like a part of you has died.
So I decided that I would to try to compose a Little Fuzzies piece at least. Surely that would put me in the mood and get me inspired.
But sitting down to write any piece of music is overwhelming. Every time. It’s hard and we resist doing hard things. But whenever I have something big, important, and thus overwhelming to do, someone very close to me comes to visit. Somehow she knows that things are hard and overwhelming and she just shows up. You might have met her…her name’s Procrastination.
Do you know her?
Well, she visited me for days. Every time I thought I should really get down to composing, she was right there, distracting me and finding more fun and easy things for me to do.
She was relentless. But a part of me was getting cranky, and I think my family noticed I was really “off.” So I finally did what I have to do every time and that is to lock Procrastination in the closet and sit down on the piano bench and start doing the hard work of composing.
Nothing glamorous. Just making myself sit down to do it. Procrastination kept knocking on the closet door. And I kept having to ignore her.
But I began. And that’s a big word here. Beginning is the hardest creative part of the process sometimes. And the next hardest part is what happens after you’ve begun and Procrastination and Distraction are banging on the closet door!
You’re probably expecting me to say that at some point inspiration struck. That flow happened soon after that. But you’d be wrong.
What did happen was that Efficiency visited me.
Now you might think Efficiency is a welcome friend. But not during the creative process. Because Efficiency is the character that looks at all the melodies and motives I’ve written, rewritten, and rejected and says, “What are you doing? You’re wasting so much time. Just use one of these melodies. They’re good enough! You’ve wasted a whole day composing melodic motives and have nothing to show for it.”
Unfortunately, I can’t put Efficiency in the closet. She’s just a part of my personality and will always be there. But I did put her in the back seat.
So I sat there for hours, writing motives, and crossing them out. Writing a stanza of lyrics about the Fuzzies, only to decide that the idea wasn’t good enough for kids. I replaced words with synonyms. I rewrote rhythms, rewrote the melody, and fought tooth and nail for every word, note, melody, and rhyme.
“You’re wasting so much time, Wendy! This is never going to come together!” Efficiency is yelling at me now.
I would love to tell you that I started to feel inspiration after all that struggle. That the process got easier and easier. But that’s not the case. What actually happened was that I made decision after decision after decision. And with each decision came another opportunity for a different note or a different word, and very slowly but surely a piece began to form and I began to again fall in love with the process and with the music.
As I saw the first piece come together, Momentum finally visited me. I got excited and energized and was able to create the next pieces more easily. But I still had to put Efficiency in the back seat. I had ignore Procrastination and Distraction’s pounding on the closet door. I had to welcome Decision instead of arguing with her. It was slow. It was sluggish. It was messy.
But that’s the creative process.
As you already know, I was able to compose six pieces that, after the first piece, I truly enjoyed creating. I was able to settle into the beauty of the process, and not worry so much about the outcome.
This reminded me of this quote by Chuck Close:
The advice I like to give anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to do an awful lot of work.
All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.” ~ Chuck Close
Do you identify with the struggle of starting a new creative endeavor? What’s the most difficult part of the creative process for you? What distractions visit you when you are trying to work on a creative project?
I love this! Thank you for writing it! I try to encourage creativity in my studio. Students really struggle with a visit from all of your friends above! I love how you personified these different feelings.
I agree, work is essential to accomplish anything! My husband is a Chemistry professor, and he talks about the law of Thermodynamics a lot! You must input energy to receive an outcome! Thank you for all your beautiful musical compositions!
The creative process is akin to music practice too I think. We have those 4 so-called friends come our way all the time to distract us and very often we ( students in particular) don’t show up at the piano as regularly and as consistently as we should to practise with intention.😬
Look forward to your art and music series and video games music.
Wendy, thank you for writing this article and also including the article by Chuck Close. It helps to pinpoint and understand my own procrastination issues. I agree that it is difficult to start some things, especially things that seem really difficult. And yes, once we start, the distractions come quickly. And when the ideas start coming, they come so rapidly that it’s hard to hang on to them. I try to write those ideas down and stay with the project at the same time every day, if possible. And this is for any big project other than composition. But thanks for sharing that you struggle with this because it seems that you don’t! I think your output of pieces is amazing and I’m so happy that you share them with us. You are an inspiration to all of us.