The Benefits of Writing Quickly

There is a value to speedwriting in the creative arts. And yes, it is possible to train your brain to work quickly.

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For a songwriter, the creative process involves two separate abilities: 1) the ability to spontaneously create new musical ideas; and 2) the ability to organize those ideas into good songs. Typically, the first part — creating the ideas — is the part that can happen rather quickly, while the organizing — the actual “writing” — can take time.

It could be argued that the second part — the writing stage — is the part where good songs live or die. You can have great ideas, but if they aren’t organized properly you can wind up with a dud instead of a successful song.

But actually, songwriting is like the proverbial 2-edged sword. Your song can never be good if the ideas you’re creating aren’t good ones, and even if you’ve got great ideas, you’ve only got a good song if those ideas are well-organized.

Most songwriters would agree that there is a kind of momentum that goes hand-in-hand with songwriting. Once you get going, and good ideas start to flow, that there can be a great benefit to writing quickly. There is nothing worse than feeling the creative juices flowing, but you’re stuck in traffic, or you’re in the middle of your shift at work. You feel the need to get going, and get going NOW.

So the creative process that leads to good songs is the quick back-and-forth between creating ideas and organizing ideas.

Research shows that there is a benefit to learning to write quickly — to shorten the time it takes to organize your ideas. It’s something you can train your mind to do. Ultimately you want to not just create musical ideas quickly, but you want to work them into good music quickly. Speedwriting in the songwriting world will feel awkward at first, because the second stage — the organizing stage — is what usually slows writers down.

I’ve written a blog post in the past that encourages songwriters to write a song in 7 minutes or less. But if that’s a bit scary, perhaps try the following — a 15-minute song. With this method you’ll be aiming to write a verse and a chorus in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee. The suggested times are at the end of each step:

1. Choose a song topic: approx. 30 seconds.
2. Create 2 chord progressions, one for the verse and one for the chorus (you can use the same for both if you wish): approx. 1 minute.
3. Create a melody: approx. 5 minutes.
4. Build a list of words that relate to that topic. Organize the list into 2 columns — words that seem observational, and words that seem emotional: 1-and-a-half minutes.
5. Create a verse and chorus lyric: approx. 5 minutes.
6. Fix and hone: approx. 2 minutes.

There’s no rule that says you must do those steps in that order. Whatever feels natural to you will be fine.

Sometimes, to be successful, we need some imagery to help give us incentive. So imagine… you’ve been invited to a TV studio to do an interview about your songwriting. When you get there, the interviewer says that they assumed you’d be presenting a new song to the audience. You’ve got 15 minutes to come up with one!

GO!

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Written by Gary Ewer. Follow on Twitter.

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