Writing | Corey Stewart Online

One of my primary songwriting goals of 2011 is to never be afraid of words again.

Ideally, what this means for me is that by conquering my fear of words or, more accurately, the fear of my words (and therefore me, as a person) being judged by others, I will be able to increase my songwriting output by finishing all of my half completed songwriting ideas because at the moment a distinct lack of lyrical material is what is standing in the way of me completing my current batch of songwriting ideas.

I have no real idea how I came to the conclusion that writing lyrics is not one of my strong points but that is how I was seeing myself as a musician first and a lyricist (a very distant) second.

I know that the above statement is not true however, I have said it to myself so many times now that my subconscious believes it. It’s like I’m fulfilling some sort of prophesy about my (lack of) songwriting process.

The biggest problem I have with my with lyric writing process is that I self censor far too early in the piece. I need to give myself the permission to put down on paper whatever comes to me, to write what is inside of me no matter whether I consider it crap or not and no matter how bad it might look on paper.

For some reason I’ve succumbed to the belief that I have nothing of value to say to the world through my lyrics. What a way to sabotage my songwriting and my creativity as a whole.

Yes, I’m pretty good at that.

Even though words have the power to change things and therefore, need to be treated with the respect they deserve, they can’t hurt me and my so called fear of them should not silence me.

The best thing I can do is to roll up my sleeves and just write. I know that by doing this I will conquer my fear of words.

One song at a time…

Peace,

Corey

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Call me old fashioned but I still prefer writing with pen to paper rather than to use a word processor.

In my music room I have piles of paper with (half finished) song lyrics, to do lists, general ideas and random thoughts, lines, phrases and song titles all neatly presented for future reference.

I’ve attempted to use a computer keyboard and word processor instead of pen and paper to jot down my ramblings and I’ve found that the feeling of continuity between head/heart and computer screen is not the same as the organic scrawl of a really good quality pen.

Somehow the act of putting pen to paper allows me to be an integral part of what I’m writing whereas I feel distant from my ideas if I type it.

Yes, I know that for this very post to exist I would’ve had to have typed the words into a word processor or directly into the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress however, I wrote this particular post on paper first.

I don’t do this with every post however, I got the idea for this post from automatically and randomly writing on pieces of paper as a means of clearing my mind of the stuff it has collected over time. A bit of mental cleaning.

I’m a big fan of technology but at the same time I’d hate to see the art of writing with pen and paper disappear for good.

What do you think? Pen and paper or keyboard and word processor?

Peace,

Corey