Musician’s Notebook

A lot of us, sit down with a blank piece of paper and use a whole lot more of brain power with the results of nothing coming out. What I have learned in Berklee Music is that destination writing was one of the greatest things I have ever to accelerate and improve your songwriting techniques.

Remember everyone this is music and this is not rules, but guidelines.

There’s a method to everything so these can be your way of writing or not, it might not work for everyone but what I can tell you is, if you have a hardtime writing lyrics 90% of the people I know that have done this had no problems writing lyrics.

So here’s the deal, I’m going to list a few steps on what you do to practice destination writing.

1) Think of a place (subway, bathroom, forest, bordello, etc)
2) Use your five senses (See, Hear, Touch, Taste, and Smell) to describe this place.
3) Put an alarm for 5 minutes from right before you begin writing.
4) Then just start writing and do what I mentioned in step 2 but also include how it makes you feel (or the character, if its not you).
5) In this writing process try to provide hints of a story which relates to steps 2 and 4.
6) Once, the alarm goes off, STOP! Seriously don’t cheat you’re only cheating yourself.

At first, you might find yourself with like a small amount of words and its hard to work off of it. Relax, it’s cool. It happened to all of us, in fact, when I first started I only had a 5 sentenced paragraph. As you begin to practice this daily you’re destination writing will be a lot longer and you will have more to work with.

On the next tip I will provide you with the next step after destination writing. For now, just keep doing destination writings.

Additional Tip: Another way to improve your writing is to get a notebook and pen and have it accessible to you when you wake up. Don’t waste another second and pick up the pen and just write whatever comes to mind. You’re sleepy and everything which means your subconsciousness is still awaken. You might have a brain fart at first but just make the pen move. Who cares if its one sentence or 30 sentences. Just write whatever is on your mind it doesn’t even need to make much sense. This is another way to get lyrical ideas. Many albums successful albums were inspired by the subconsciousness.

One great example is John Petrucci, the guitarist and main lyricist of Dream Theater wrote the lyrics based on a past life regression he had, which later became Metropolis Pt.1: The Miracle And The Sleeper and then later on The epic concept album Metropolis 2: Scenes From A Memory.

Other subconsciousness success stories can be found here in this article

Anyways, just continue with the destination writing and subconsciousness writing and you’ll be closer and closer to never facing an empty sheet of paper again.