Thoughts on Inspiration
What happens when creativity stops flowing freely? Should we just stop creating?
I’ve always been a creative person. And what I mean by that is that I’ve always been a maker. I love making things. It gives me all sorts of good feelings.
When I was a kid I used to make cardboard guitars and models of buildings with little things inside. I used to play with LEGO all the time.
As an adult, I turned it into a way of paying the bills: I became a designer and I make websites and other digital things for a living.
In my teenage years though, I turned to something else. In my late teens I started my own band. Myself and a couple of mates managed to get a hold of some instruments and like many other bands, we started by playing covers of well known rock songs.
That was fine and I enjoyed it, but the maker in me was a bit restless. I wanted us to make our own music, to write our own songs.
But, I had no idea how to do so. I knew nothing about songwriting and apart from poorly playing the drums, I couldn’t really play anything else.
I tried to get my two bandmates — both of which played the guitar — to write some songs, but it wasn’t really their thing, unfortunately.
I was a bit stuck. I didn’t really know what to do.
One day, after school, in 1997, I was sat on train, waiting for it to take me home (I used to live in a small town about 20 minutes from where I went to school).
That train had these sort of old-school carriages which had a series of compartments, each with 8 seats or so, and I always used to go to one of those and just sit there quietly, usually on my own, waiting for the train to go.
On that particular day, I was eating a little chicken pie — we call them empadas in Portugal. I wasn’t thinking about writing songs or my band or anything remotely related to those things. I was just sitting, waiting, and eating.
All of a sudden the most amazing thing happened: there was this melody that just sort of materialised in my head. I don’t know where it came from or what caused it to be there, but there it was. And it wasn’t just a melody; there were words that were coming with the melody: lyrics.
I immediately grabbed a pen and started writing down the words on the chicken pie’s wrapping paper, as I sort of sang the melody in my head.
And it wasn’t just a line or two that came out. It was a whole song, complete with two verses and a chorus.
The whole thing didn’t last more than 10 minutes or so and by the time the train finally left, I had the whole song in my head.
I sang it in my head all the way home — over and over and over — because remember, this was before smartphones that have voice memo apps and I didn’t want to forget it.
By the time I got home, I’d memorised it, because I sang it in my head so many times. I still remember it today.
The next day I went to band practice and I sang it to my mates, they added some chords and just like that, we had our first original song.
After that, I went on to write a couple more songs in a similar fashion: they would just pop up in my head and I would then sing them to my bandmates and they’d put some chords against it.
I then decided to learn how to play the guitar, so I could actually write the songs myself, properly.
For the next 10 years I wrote dozens of songs and every single one of them was born in a very similar way to that first one: I would be going on about my life and then BOOM — out of seemingly nowhere I would feel a rush of inspiration and a song would pop into my head.
Often, it would be when I was in bed, just about to fall asleep. I would get up, grab my guitar, a pen and paper and write it down.
So, in my mind, that was it. It was just a matter of inspiration. Either I had it and I would write songs, or I didn’t and I wouldn’t.
It didn’t really matter where that inspiration was coming from or whether I could harvest it somehow. I was just happy I had those moments of inspiration and that I was writing songs.
Something I did notice though (even though I never paid much attention to it at the time), was that the more I played, whether it was with the band or on my own, the more I would have these moments of inspiration.
I would often write songs just after we finished rehearsing with the band, for example. I would get home and just feel like writing.
In 2008 I moved to London and I pretty much stopped playing. I would still play a little bit on my own at home, but I completely stopped playing with other people.
As a reflection of that, my production, in terms of songwriting, went down dramatically. I went from writing about 20 songs per year, to writing maybe 4 or 5 if I was lucky.
I didn’t think much about it at the time because my focus was somewhere else. I was trying to start my career. But a few years ago I started feeling ‘the need’ again. I wanted to write, but it felt like the inspiration wasn’t there anymore.
So, what could I do?
One thing I did was that I decided to start learning a bit more music theory. I felt like whenever I wrote a song they always came out a bit the same, so I thought that maybe expanding my musical knowledge would help with that (and it did).
The second (and most important) thing I did, was that I decided I wasn’t going to wait for inspiration to strike anymore. I was going to approach the creative process of writing a song in a different manner: I was basically going to force myself to write songs.
And the way I did that was that I started going into it with an intent. I would grab the guitar and think to myself: “I’m going to write a song now”, as opposed to grabbing the guitar and just noodling around hoping that magic would happen (which is what I would do before).
Apart from that, I also started giving myself starting points or prompts. Now, these could be anything: a particular chord progression, a scale, a type of song structure, a word, a sentence, anything that in any shape or form got my attention.
The result of doing these things was that I started writing a lot more again. It worked. Not only that, but I feel like I’m writing better, more interesting songs now.
I still don’t write as much as used to, but that’s probably due to just not having time to do it really. But every time I pick up the guitar with the intent to write a song, I usually end up at least starting a song — I may not finish the whole thing in one go, but I’ll start something and then I’ll come back to it and finish it later. And sometimes, I do it in one go.
Now, the whole point of me telling this ridiculously long story is that I believe that this method of creation can be applied to anything. We, as designers, often are under pressure to be creative — we might have to design a logo, or set a design direction for a project — and it can be hard because, you know, inspiration doesn’t always strike when we need it, and when it comes to client-paid work, we can’t afford to just sit there and wait for it to strike.
By approaching your creative process like this: with an intent and with a starting point or prompt you can kind of jump start your brain and put it into creative mode.
