Chapter Six: Improving FLOW
From Songfarmer: Writing More and Better Songs
Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Prompts, Conclusion
Improving Flow
“I’m interested in discovering where my mind wants to go, or what object it wants to pick up… It always picks up on something true… as a lyricist my job is to find out what it is that I’m thinking. Even if it’s something that I don’t want to be thinking.”
- Paul Simon
“Great ideas occur to you and the last thing you want to do is sit down, at that moment, and shape it. You just want to ride. So I usually just record it and then listen back.”
- Jackson Browne
In a strange way, you were born knowing how to FLOW, and you really just need to adjust the timing of your EDIT mode habits to get more FLOW into your life and songs. Your brain stores connected information. Each sound, picture, or feeling is connected to every other sound, picture, and feeling through thousands of circuitous routes and neural pathways. FLOW is really just allowing the connections that are already present in your brain to be revealed to your conscious mind. Think of FLOW as the act of gently picking up a thread (of any idea) and following it, picking it up and following it, as it goes on through other linked and connected ideas. When Pete Seeger wanted to FLOW, he said to himself: “Brain, ramble on. Let me see what happens.”
EDIT mode happens when you evaluate, select, and structure the connections that are revealed during the FLOW mode. The key is to do this EDIT mode later, after the FLOW session has produced material, not during the FLOW session!
Your mind is always working on problems in the subconscious, just outside of your awareness. If you have the goal of getting ideas, your subconscious will occasionally present some of these ideas to your conscious mind, and you should always write them down. You can evaluate them from the EDIT mode later - just write the ideas down when you get them in order to keep them coming! Your ideas are like customers: If you treat them with respect and honor them, they will come back to you, time and time again. If you ignore them, or disrespect them by not at least acknowledging them by writing them down, they will not come back to you, until proper attention and respect is shown to them.
The FLOW mode is about discovery - your goal in this mode is to discover the contents of your thoughts and their connections. You want to get the editor/critic out of the way so that the ideas can come forth and be captured on the page or on the voice recorder. There are a few techniques and concepts that relate to improving your ability and awareness of FLOW, and we’ll discuss a few of those methods here.
To anyone who says, “oh, I could never come up with an imaginative story” or anyone who says “I’m just not creative,” ask them about the last dream they had, and get ready to hear an interesting, entertaining, and creative story from someone who just said they can’t come up with ideas. If you want proof that your brain already has all the creativity you need, just think about the vivid dreams you’ve had in your life. Some examples of what the FLOW mode is like: it’s what’s happening when you are dreaming, mowing the grass, and driving long highways.
Dreaming
You can get seeds for songs from dreams if you keep a notebook by your bed. Set a goal to remember your dreams before you go to sleep, and then note or record the ideas you get while falling asleep and the ideas you have right away when you wake up in the morning. (Warning: this technique can make for less restful sleep, so don’t have this goal when you’re really needing to recharge.)
It’s really that simple. Have a pen and a notebook (or a smartphone note app or voice memo recorder) by the bed, and commit to recording any song seeds, rewrite ideas, or as much as you can remember of dreams. Some songwriters think about a lyric they are trying to edit - or a lyric they are seeking a melody for - right before bed, with the intention of using brain activity during sleep to solve the problem. We use this technique regularly, and we know other songwriters who have woken up after this exercise with a revised lyric phrase ready to write down or a musical idea that works for the lyric.
Morning Pages
In The Artist’s Way, the author Julia Cameron discusses “morning pages” which are 1, 2, or 3 pages written first thing in the morning in the open FLOW state with no structure or editor looking over your shoulder. It is a valuable routine for clearing out and recording fragments that can keep ideas coming while you are still close to that dreaming state.
Improvisation
In Keith Johnstone’s book Impro, the famed Canadian theater instructor shows how the techniques of improvisation in the theater are very similar to writing in the FLOW mode. Johnstone refers to the EDIT mode as the “gatekeeper” who judges the acceptability of ideas that are produced spontaneously. Much of the art of improvisation involves learning to turn off the gatekeeper and allowing ideas and performances to emerge in an uninhibited way. Learn as much as you can about the techniques of improvisation to do better at FLOW.
Strange words
Sometimes strange words, arcane bits of slang, technical vocabulary from another field, or rarely combined words can create an intriguing idea to explore with a song. Take a look at lists of slang online or listen closely at the next family reunion to see if any colorful phrases spark music or lyrics for you.
Writing as Fast as You Can
Another technique for entering the FLOW mode is to write or type faster than your EDIT mode can keep up. By writing as fast as you can until you fill up a set number of pages or until you get to a target number of words or for a set period of time, you can practice writing closer to the speed of thought.
Bob Dylan spoke of something like FLOW saying “put yourself in an environment where you can accept all the unconscious stuff that comes to you from the inner working of your mind… take it all down. You have to be able to get the thoughts out of your mind.”
Shitty First Drafts
Opening up, dropping perfectionistic tendencies, and giving yourself permission to write a “shitty first draft” are skills that have to be learned and practiced. Anne Lamont, in her book Bird by Bird, advocates this “shitty first draft” technique, and most of us will admit that it does make intuitive sense to write and produce a text this way. Write without editing because once you get the ideas down you can always go back and polish, reorder, cut, and add to them as needed. If your internal critic (or the EDIT mode) jumps all over you in this exercise, just say, “easy tiger, this is just the first draft, you’ll get to polish and rework it after I’m done.”
Different positions, different tunings
If the chords or the progressions you are playing don’t move you or they don’t seem to suggest possibilities, it may be time to learn some new chords or play the chords you already know in a different way. Try capoing the guitar up a few (or many) frets. Look up an open tuning and tune your individual strings to Open D, Open G, or Open C to see if the sounds of the chords strike your ear or your mind in a different way and shake some ideas loose. Or use a tuning like Drop D. Or use a capo at the second fret, but leave the low E (the biggest string) open so that the capo is only clipped on the bottom five strings. Play a D chord (which, with the capo on at fret 2 will actually be an E chord) and see if the sound leads to musical ideas for you.
If you use piano, instead of using C major chord, try using chords on the black keys, like C#, F#, and G#. Subtly different frequencies may sound fresh to your ears. In general, if you find yourself mildly bored by the chords you are playing, it’s time to learn some new chords or some new voices of chords. Learn to play a diminished chord, or change the order of the notes in the chords you play (called inverted chords).
Repetitive, Meditative States
As mentioned earlier, if the pure FLOW mode is like dreaming, then many people can get to a FLOW type state in the early morning after just waking up. The Beach Boys lead songwriter Brian Wilson warns against too much coffee when writing because he suggests you may become too awake in some ways to take advantage of the FLOW mode.
Some songwriters go for a drive, a walk, a run, or a hike to engage a FLOW mode, and then they pause the activity to take notes on the ideas or have a compose session when the FLOW state seems accessible. Some have spoken of mowing the grass or exercising to “get the channel open.”
Find some quiet and be disciplined. Turn off the radio or the TV, and be with the quiet, so that your mind can be tempted to create and fill the empty space with ideas. Being in nature is a great way to get the quiet, and being close to the natural world leads to wide perspective and truth - two qualities that are valued in great songs.
Experiment to see what works best for you to get the editor and the critic out of the way. The bottom line, best measure of the FLOW mode is getting something down - words on the page, a chord progression, or a recording of a melody.
And finally, to use FLOW mode, remember to connect with a spirit of play and enjoyment of music and writing. The most reliable reward of creative work happens in the present, when you can enjoy the process and focus on loving writing for it’s own sake - not for its results.
FLOW experiment
Here are a few ideas regarding getting better at writing in the FLOW mode. Think of the FLOW mode as a kind of free-associating, improvising, riffing writing style, a style that’s very different than most of the other work you do.
Your dreams at night are pure FLOW mode, so keep that in mind as the ideal when you are in a FLOW session. While you are dreaming, your mind is just following connected ideas, so a FLOW session in many ways is a kind of waking sleep or a trance or a childlike trusting of your own mind to present the ideas, while your conscious, analytical mind completely withholds judgment or evaluation.
Following your connected ideas is another way of thinking about the FLOW mode. Come up with some cues that signal to yourself that you are going to do this very special kind of work. Design cues in your environment to help you go into the FLOW mode - cues that can remind you to put aside the analytical, critical thinking of the EDIT mode.
For a FLOW strengthening experiment, Owen sometimes goes into the dining room in his house (a room where he rarely does any critical thinking or planning) with a notebook or the laptop, and does a 10 minute session of free writing in the FLOW mode. He has experimented with putting on a certain hat that he only wears during FLOW mode, and he has found it to be a useful cue. He has experimented with taking off his shoes to signal FLOW mode, and he has found that helpful too.
So if you see Owen wearing a hat, with his shoes off in the dining room, you know he’s FLOWing so don’t interrupt him, okay?
Why do we bother trying to adjust the cues to this extent? Why bother going into another room or sitting at a different spot at the table or wearing a different hat or no shoes when you do this free-associative kind of work? Because switching to FLOW mode is a skill, it requires practice, and anything that might make the skill easier to practice is welcome. It might work for you too, so the next session of FLOW mode that you do (during a creativity appointment, morning pages, journaling or composing) try adopting a cue (or several cues) that could help you get into your FLOW routine.
Important: Take the hat off, or put your shoes on, or move back to your more usual workspot before you do anything remotely related to the EDIT mode, right? Right. Keep the cues related to FLOW mode, and ditch them when you go back to your normal work or EDIT mode work.