Increasing Creative Productivity in Three Stages

Over the past six months I’ve been more prolific as a musician than at any other point during my life. At the center of this productivity have been three types of creative sessions that work together.

There are many stages of creating art and certainly these vary from one artist to the next but the three I mention here have been fundamental in my ability to build up a “stockpile” of musical ideas and pieces I’ve now begun sharing in my newsletter Notes Unfolding and elsewhere.

Above I used the word “stockpile.” Since I can’t expect myself to sit down, have an inspired musical idea, and develop it into something organized all in one session, I rely on having a kind of catalog (or at least a junk drawer!) of short ideas to revisit when I’m ready to have a longer working session. Here’s how I’ve built up the stockpile and started sharing more music.

Daily “free-writes”

You’ve probably heard of freewriting when it comes to writers getting their creative juices flowing, perhaps first thing in the morning, but this kind of free-form “putting pen to paper” can be crucial in many disciplines. For my music it’s the first stage in forming a collection of ideas for potential future development, and it could mean a session as short as five minutes (with perhaps as short as ten or twenty seconds recorded at the end).

It’s important to approach these short (and ideally recurring) free-form sessions without expectations. When I sit down at my digital piano without much thought or hesitation, I can end a five-minute session without too much thought as to whether or not what I’ve just done is any good. It doesn’t matter. If at the end I record a short snippet of whatever seemed to come out of the session then I can listen back later with fresh ears — it’s almost a guarantee that I’ll find a few of these short recordings inspiring to the point that I’ll want to do something more with them. (And even if I do nothing with these short recordings, I think it’s kind of cool to have a growing set of short musical ideas preserved somewhere.)

Longer, scheduled creative sessions

Over the years I’ve often sat down to play music with the idea of doing so for a longer stretch of time, let’s say an hour, but without any idea of where I’ll go with it. Sometimes I’ll feel like things are clicking and other times the session will be frustrating — nothing flows. Even without a defined starting point these longer and perhaps scheduled sessions built regularly into our creative routine can be important for us, the frustrating ones included. (As an aside, when I hit a creative wall I sometimes think of it as a good time to work through some scales or hand exercises so the time still feels worth spent.)

That being said, by revisiting the mini recordings from very short, low-pressure free-form sessions discussed above, I can find a few pieces that inspire me in the moment and make those the focus of the longer creative sessions. In this way I am essentially guaranteeing myself that I’ll start from a place of inspiration and expand that musical notion into something a little bigger. Now I’ve got a stockpile of slightly more mature musical ideas in addition to many short musical notions from the free-form sessions.

Calling it “good enough to share”

In the past I’ve probably thought about “releasing” music as something that should be done with a lot of ceremony and after many hours of reworking, mixing, mastering, and otherwise perfecting my creations.

More recently I started thinking about what making music really means to me. I concluded that on a basic level I just want to record some of these many (many) musical things that pop into my head at all hours of the day, and which I’ve only occasionally nurtured. I’ve always felt I have something inside of me that I want or need to say musically. If so, I shouldn’t expect myself to say them perfectly any more than I expect anything that comes out of my mouth in daily conversation to be, somehow, “perfect.” Try as we might, communication is messy.

And so I put my mind to the challenge of both recording and sharing my music. With platforms like Soundcloud and Bandcamp there was no regularity required on my part to publish anything so I created a publication via Substack where I would be somewhat beholden to sending music at pre-defined days and times to at least a few subscribers. This leads me to a third type of music making session wherein I have to bring one of those slightly more mature ideas into a form that feels at least coherent or partially complete for sharing. This doesn’t mean perfectly mixed or even free of mistakes. It also might be a fragment but at least recorded with a concrete sense of a start and end for the sake of whatever I share in a given issue. I usually include a few thoughts about the creative process. I do this every Tuesday and Friday, which has often felt like quite a lot but I know I can scale back if needed.

I’m not saying everyone should do this specific thing. The key thing for me has been sharing my creations with some regularity. Why? Because it means that I inevitably reach a point, regularly, where I have to say to myself that whatever I’m working on is good enough to be shared with someone. It doesn’t have to feel perfect, even to me. And it doesn’t have to mean that I can’t expand or rework it later on and share it again in a more polished form.

I might go back and listen to everything I’ve shared in Notes Unfolding and think that some of it falls short of what I could be putting out there. In fact, all of what I’ve shared could be more finished in some way (and this will probably always be the case). Happily, when I listen to what I’ve shared I generally feel really good about it. And for good reason: I know that it’s usually gone through at least those two prior steps above and probably more, even if from the onset of the idea to it being shared only a few days have passed.

So in this way, by “calling it done” (for now at least), I’m building up that stockpile with even more mature (often really nice, I think) pieces of music, which I could still always take back to the table for further expansion but quite often am happy to leave alone.

How the layers fit together

Each one of these layers, each type of creative session, involves some amount of removing pressure from myself. In the case of “free-writes,” there should be almost no expectation of myself except to play something for a few minutes and usually record a short piece at the end. With the longer sessions, by starting with one of those short recordings I remove the pressure to have a burst of inspiration in the moment. And when it comes to “finalizing” a piece of music to the point of sharing, I’ve learned to “trade perfect for done” and allow myself the freedom to share my work knowing I could do something else with it later on.

Taking the self doubt out of the creative process (including sharing creations) has been critical but so has having the option to approach music making within my choice of one of those types of sessions described above, depending on the amount of time I have or the frame of mind I happen to be in. It’s important to recognize these different aspects of the creative process and not expect everything to happen within the same session.

A final thought

None of these comments about artistic “productivity” say anything about just embracing the process without regard to finishing or sharing anything. And hopefully if you’re an artist you find yourself doing just that: enjoying the beauty of being immersed in your creativity without getting overly preoccupied with who else might experience your creation. To this I would just add that finding the discipline to approach my own music in the ways I described above has in fact led to my further enjoyment of the various stages of the creative process.

In less words than I’ve used above, I often include a bit of context about my creative process along with the original music I share regularly through Notes Unfolding. If you think this might be interesting or would like to see where my music has been leading, please go ahead and subscribe.