Chapter 3: Screw the Blank Page

There are some common reasons creative blocks arise, but more importantly, there are strategies that can help you generate ideas and beat the blank page forever.

What follows between the lines is the original 2015 text of chapter one. I’ll expand a bit on the popular highlights afterward.

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Most artists encounter the much-feared creative block at some point in their lives. Some seem to be plagued with blocks. There are some common reasons creative blocks arise, but more importantly, there are strategies that can help you generate ideas and beat the blank page forever.

Fear Itself

The major cause of real creative blocks is fear: fear of success, fear of failure, fear of being recognized as a fraud, fear of ridicule, or one of the other common flavors of fear. Blocks can temporarily (or even permanently) shield us from those fears, because they give us an excuse for not starting, finishing, or sharing our work.

There are hundreds of books out there on this subject. I can personally recommend almost anything by Eric Maisel, particularly Van Gogh Blues. If you find yourself seriously, totally blocked, you might consider educating yourself a little, or even consulting a therapist or creativity coach.

Barring some deep psychological reason for not being able to create, blocks are, in my experience, mostly illusions brought on by false assumptions or option anxiety.

Make-Believe Monsters

False assumptions may come from something we’ve read or been told, or even something we’ve made up ourselves. One example is thinking you can’t make good music without having certain gear or software. Another is that you need a degree or a certain number of years experience. Perhaps you’re convinced that it takes 2 years to make an album, or that you have to be able to perform your music exactly as it’s recorded.

One of the best things about being an experimental artist is that it’s a lot easier to call bullshit on pretty much any assumption. As we covered in the last chapter, there are rules, but they’re your rules. You make them. If there’s a rule holding you back, get rid of it. Question all of your assumptions and beliefs about music, and then erase any of them that aren’t pushing you forward.

I have an album that consists of one 60-minute track. I know of an artist who released a one-minute long album consisting of 20 5-second tracks. There are tracks ranging from 1 beat per minute to 50,000 bpm, and plenty with no pulse at all. There are tracks with drums, tracks without drums, and tracks with drums but no rhythm. The point is, question everything, hold nothing sacred, and make your own rules.

I actually have a couple of hour-long albums now. Here’s one of them:

Option Anxiety

Quite often, artists experience creative blocks stemming from “fear of the blank page”. For musicians, this can happen when you sit down to write a new song, at the beginning of a new album project, or even trying to come up with a decent bass line.

Here’s the secret to dealing with the blank page: don’t do it. Never start with a blank slate, ever. Most of the time, blank page phobia, thinly veiled as a fear that we’re all out of good ideas, is really the result of too much possibility. This is option anxiety. The way to reduce option anxiety is to remove some stuff from the table. Limit your options. Choose a starting point that’s not zero.

Beating the blank page is what we’re going to focus on here. If you’ve passed your Rorschach test and kicked all your bad assumptions to the curb, the following strategies should keep you running smoothly from here on out.

Plan Three Moves Ahead

No matter where you’re at in your current project, always know what you’re doing next. Keep a steady queue of things to do, and you’ll not only ensure momentum, but you’ll be more motivated to finish your current project so you can tackle the next one.

I have several strategies in this area to help me stay ahead of myself. I love words, so I’ll keep a list of cool words I think of that might be useful as song names or album names. Those may lead to album cover ideas, or may help give direction to some piece of digital art that I’m working on. The end result is that I always have 3-5 album covers ready to go. An added benefit is that when it comes time to pick my next project, I’ve had some time to passively think about it before actually starting.

Homework

Whether it’s a word, an image, an idea, or a set of guidelines, what you’re doing is giving yourself assignments or exercises to complete. If you look at it that way, you can create projects out of almost anything: a technique from a magazine, a new app you just bought, or something as simple as a tempo.

It’s important to write these things down, or give yourself some way to review your upcoming assignments regularly. I keep all of my planned album covers in a shared photo album that I can access from any of my iPads or phone. I also keep a list of track titles and project ideas in a text file saved to DropBox so I can get to it from anywhere.

Randomization

One thing I started doing years ago is using random.org to generate numbers to help define a project. A random number between 1 and 12 can decide which key or tonic note to use. A number between 60 and 160 might decide the tempo. Using that info you could filter any loops or samples you might have down to a workable number and find something to use as a starting point.

Even though I still do that from time to time, things have come a long way, and a lot of apps offer some sort of randomization functions to help generate sounds or patterns. Some apps are specifically designed to generate ideas in this way.

Science Experiments

While the process of creating experimental art or music is generally closer to engineering design than scientific method, there’s still plenty of room for exploring “what if” scenarios. What if you sprinkled tempo changes randomly throughout a track? What if you let one app control another app? What if you layered a sample with a copy of the same sample, only reversed? What if you created a hi-hat sequence based on the Fibonacci sequence?

To Boldly Go...

An interesting approach for generating new ideas is to throw yourself into a situation you know absolutely nothing about. Pick an app you’ve never used, open it up, turn all the knobs and punch a bunch of buttons and see what happens. This can be especially liberating if you’re the type who normally reads the whole manual before hitting the first key.

Whether it’s as simple as choosing a random preset and hitting record, or as extreme as closing your eyes and tapping the screen with all of your fingers at the same time, taking advantage of the limited beginner phase that happens with each new app or tool can lead to some interesting ideas.

Doing It Wrong

I love this approach so much that it was almost the title of this book. Simply put, find a way to use an app in a way the developer didn’t intend for it to be used. Fill a drum machine app with vocal samples. Use an external MIDI clock to drive a groovebox app at extremely fast or slow tempos. Route Siri through a vocal harmonizer. Run an orchestral app through a guitar amp simulator. Hack, bend, fold, spindle, mutilate – just be careful not to crack your screen.

Outside the Music Box

Before we get to the important, shiny, technical specifics, I’ll leave you with one final suggestion about beating the blank page. Explore as many different types of music and art as you possibly can. Listen to things you don’t like, look at art books and photographs, pay attention to movie soundtracks. Read a book (see what I did there?). And then listen to your thoughts, pay attention to your emotional response, take a note and file it away for later. I can’t totally explain why Giger’s artwork has such a huge impact on the way my music sounds, but it does. Inspiration comes from strange and mysterious places, so make sure you visit them when you can.

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This is the end of part one of the book, and again, most of this still tracks. We’ll get into more technical iOS-specific stuff in the following chapters. In the meantime, here are the most common reader highlights from this chapter:

The practice of experimental music making is akin to playing scientist. You’re taking a gamble that some idea that popped into your head will produce a sound that’s interesting or pleasing. Your standing hypothesis in each musical experiment is that your current technique will prove useful in future experiments. You take what works (and the knowledge of what doesn’t) and continue to iterate, building your own body of theory and technique. Sometimes a method that you’ve held on for some time stops producing the desired results, and you have to throw it out and start over with something new.

Sometimes you need to reduce the number of tools on the table in order to pick the right one. Other times you just need to just pick a path and start following it. The point is to be perpetually doing something, even if it doesn’t look exactly like what you think making art should.

“Doing it wrong” is still one of my favorite techniques for stumbling on new ideas. I recently tried controlling parameters of AudioThings’s Noises app with my guitar and it’s grown into a whole thing. I make it a habit every time I find a new app to come up with ideas for using it that the developer might not have intended.

Leave me a comment and let me know what ideas in this chapter resonate with you.

Shameless self-promotion

My new album landed on Spotify today, so if you use that platform, check it out, add it to your playlist, or whatever else people on Spotify do. :)

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