You’re looking at a blank sheet of paper and it is blankly staring back at you. Call it a serious case of writer’s block or just a routine obstacle. By any name, it’s something we all face.
The good news is, once the first few notes or lyrics are written, the rest can sometimes follow fairly easily. But how do you get over the hurdle of those first few lines?
First off, remember there’s nothing sacred about the first lines you write. They don’t have to be perfect at this stage. Once you have a rough draft, you can always go back and improve the first few lines or even replace them entirely.
The idea is to get something down on paper, a bit of an idea that you can build on, expand on and then you’re off and running. As a wise man once said, “The only way is underway.”
What follows are seven suggestions to help you get those pesky first lines written.
1. Don’t get bogged down in details at the beginning. Instead, let your creative juices flow freely, especially in the early stages. Let your imagination run wild, in all different directions. Eventually you must pick a direction. When that time comes, take the most promising one and pursue it.
2. There’s nothing sacred about your first draft. That goes double for your first few lines. Don’t hold them up to an impossibly high standard. You can always perfect them later.
3. Allow yourself to start with a trite phrase or a cliche. Anything that gets the race horse out of the block will do.
4. Steal a melody fragment from a song in the public domain, like a folk song or even a nursery rhyme. By the time you’re finished, it will have either been replaced or changed enough so as to be unrecognizable. Again the goal is to get something – anything to start you off.
5. Borrow part of a melody from one of your own songs. With new lyrics, new chords and new rhythms, I guarantee it will not sound the same.
6. Don’t worry about rhyme or even exact phrasing. I like to put down an idea and move ahead, even if the phrase is uneven or sounds stilted. I know when the time comes, a better phrase will present itself. If not, I can always tap my vocabulary (or a thesaurus or rhyming dictionary) to smooth things out.
7. Here’s one I use all the time. If you play a chordal instrument like a guitar or keyboard, learn to play a new song. As a guitarist, this invariably teaches me a new way to play a chord or inversion and almost always leads me to a new creation of my own.
Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning. – Igor Stravinsky
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