My fiction professor used to quote Isaac Bashevis Singer:
There is no such thing as writer's block, only writer's inhibitions.
Which I think is pretty much true! But which is the most frustrating thing to say to yourself if you're actually feeling kind of blocked! Because of course it demands that you actually examine those inhibitions, which is hardly ever comfortable work, and then it leads on to the work of the writing, which is even less comfortable.
When I run into trouble writing prose, my SOP is to write about why I'm having trouble. I usually wind up hashing it out on paper and eventually getting to the meat of the scene itself. Maybe the analogous musical technique would be to just start strumming and ad-lib some lyrics about how the stupid melodies keep droning around D and all the rhymes are too pat and a few of these emotions feel a bit silly.
That's really the heart of it, the emotions. A lot of the Highway Gothic songs operated more at the level of narrative than of raw feeling, and I'm venturing back into territory that has grown unfamiliar, unhabituated. (Spellcheck does not even recognize that as a word, but I'm leaving it.) There is a terrifying sense that I might not feel things in a way that is right or acceptable to anyone else. There is a concomitant and clearly defensive urge to overexplain, which might account for why my songs have so many words.
The real thing to do here, the necessary risk, might be to let the feeling linger on a long, drawn-out note. Resist the urge to fill up the line with syllables of clarification. Leave it there, open and vulnerable.
I looked for a link for that Singer quote and couldn't find it. I wonder now if it was something apocryphal—so many quotes are—a half-remembered line that made it onto the syllabus, blurred many times over in photocopy after photocopy, and then further corrupted in my own memory. Does that affect its truth? Is it truer, somehow, when you present the quote as you want to know it, the same way you pull a garment against you when it doesn't quite fit? We are never dealing with anything but ourselves in this work, our different costumes and shapes and disguises. And always the same body underneath.
When I run into trouble writing prose, my SOP is to write about why I'm having trouble. I usually wind up hashing it out on paper and eventually getting to the meat of the scene itself. Maybe the analogous musical technique would be to just start strumming and ad-lib some lyrics about how the stupid melodies keep droning around D and all the rhymes are too pat and a few of these emotions feel a bit silly.
That's really the heart of it, the emotions. A lot of the Highway Gothic songs operated more at the level of narrative than of raw feeling, and I'm venturing back into territory that has grown unfamiliar, unhabituated. (Spellcheck does not even recognize that as a word, but I'm leaving it.) There is a terrifying sense that I might not feel things in a way that is right or acceptable to anyone else. There is a concomitant and clearly defensive urge to overexplain, which might account for why my songs have so many words.
The real thing to do here, the necessary risk, might be to let the feeling linger on a long, drawn-out note. Resist the urge to fill up the line with syllables of clarification. Leave it there, open and vulnerable.
I looked for a link for that Singer quote and couldn't find it. I wonder now if it was something apocryphal—so many quotes are—a half-remembered line that made it onto the syllabus, blurred many times over in photocopy after photocopy, and then further corrupted in my own memory. Does that affect its truth? Is it truer, somehow, when you present the quote as you want to know it, the same way you pull a garment against you when it doesn't quite fit? We are never dealing with anything but ourselves in this work, our different costumes and shapes and disguises. And always the same body underneath.
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