Author without Editing

If you want to grow your guitar playing, it's a fairly straight-forward path: practice your scales, copy riffs and solos from the greats, expand your chord knowledge, study with a guitar teacher, etc. 

But growing your creativity . . . well, thats a bit more ambiguous.

First of all, creativity is subjective. What you think of as a great song might be substandard to someone else. Our favorite example of this is when Rolling Stone famously panned The Beatles’ Abbey Road, now heralded as one of the greatest records of all time. Secondly, creativity is a mixture of technique, experience, intuition, inspiration, experimentation, imitation, and maybe even a little divine intervention. So how do we improve our mastery of those more intangible qualities? 

One of our favorite ways to do just that is to author without editing. 

The idea here is to create a situation where you can temporarily turn off your inner editor and completely immerse yourself in unfiltered creation. It’s a practice in stepping outside of your comfort zone, writing freely without judgement, trusting your intuition, and tapping into a deeper well of inspiration. It also really helps to clear the cobwebs so that the next time you go to write you’re nice and warmed up! 

Of course, editing is very important. But sometimes we can fall into the trap of editing before we even begin. Authoring without editing trains our creative minds to be more comfortable with letting our creativity flow before we start the editing process. 

I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.

- Shannon Hale 

So how do we author without editing? There are many different ways, but the secret ingredient is a time limit.

Here are a few exercises to get you started. 

1. Timed free writing. Set your timer for 10 minutes and just write about a topic, without stopping, until the timer goes off. If you don’t know what to say, just write about how blank your mind is. Let your thoughts go wherever they want to go. This will become easier and more natural the more you do it. The most important part is to make sure you do not allow your editor to set foot on that page!
2. Timed Brainstorm. Set your timer for 15 minutes and set out to collect as many ideas as you can. You can collect source titles, non-lyrical hooks, piano riffs, stomp-clap rhythms, etc. Just narrow it down to one type of idea per session, and see how many you can get without worrying about how good or bad they are. 
3. Immersive Writing. Give yourself a strict time limit to write an entire song. It can be 30 minutes, 1 hour or 2 hours. Try it out several different ways! The point is to jump off the diving board head first into the deep end without allowing yourself the time to over-think.
4. Quantity over Quality. Once you’ve done some immersive writing, this is the next step. Give yourself a bigger chunk of time (say 3-5 hours) and aim to write A LOT of songs. Give yourself an actual number goal and commit to finishing that amount of songs no matter how terrible they are. For 3 hours, we recommend writing 5-6 songs. YES, YOU HEARD US RIGHT. We have done this exercise and we can attest it's a wild ride that is fun, freeing and productive! (P.S. For this exercise, we consider 2 verses and a chorus a full song).  

Creativity is intelligence having fun.

- Albert Einstein 

Just like learning an instrument or a sport, creativity requires training. Some people might make it look easy, but we promise you that they put in the work. Lucky for us, training our creativity by authoring without editing is the most fun kind of “work” we can imagine!  

Happy writing,
Allie & Bess