I've been making music for much of my life, and one of my resolutions this year was to write and record more music. Much to my neighbors' certain delight, I have also taken up serious singing practice, recently arriving at the obvious juncture where it would be nice to incorporate some crooning into my songs.

After years of noodling on various instruments, I've tapped into what feels like an endless creativity for music. I'm no prodigy, but notes come easily to me, and for this I find myself fortunate.

Song lyrics however are a completely different matter. I imagine there are many reasons that people get writer's block, but for me the root of the matter is that I struggle to take most poetry seriously, and good song lyrics are essentially good poetry. There are too many clichés and few of us have stories that are worth hearing about. In writing song lyrics, I realize I could just shovel the remnants of some musty old baggage onto the page, make it rhyme and then go belt it out, but I like to think my songs could have more potential than that. When it comes to compelling lyrics, I'm looking for a hint of the exotic, something unexpected that beckons your imagination down secret passageways to forgotten memories and feelings. That doesn't come so easily.

So when I sit down to a blank page, the cursor blinking at me and a melody running through my head, it's hard to think of anything worth writing about that hasn't already been said.

After struggling far too long writing song lyrics that made it beyond the recycling bin, I read through Pat Pattison's book, Writing Better Lyrics and adapted one of the exercises to fit my style. It has turned into one of the more reliable ways for me to get into writing mode:

Hacking my way past writer's block, the hard way

  1. Sift through various sources: magazines, websites, Reddit posts, whatever, and assemble a list of topics/ideas from these.
  2. Pick one topic at random, set a timer for fifteen minutes and write on the subject without stopping until the timer goes off. Blurt every association you have with the topic and attack it with all the senses.

With this word list technique, I found that I could have the seed of something worth continuing within a relatively short time. Building topic lists takes preparation though and I wished I could have an idea machine right in my text editor. 

Hacking my way past writer's block, the even harder way

So it was with this thought that I found myself putting my how-to books on song writing back on the shelf and instead hacking out MuseWriter, a text editor that would hopefully make it easier for me to consistently write better lyrics, even if I wasn't initially feeling it.

What is a perfect partnership between creative writing and technology? I think it's something that makes it easy to slip into the flow of writing and then stay in that flow as much as possible without distraction.

If I'm uninspired and facing a blank page, I want a poke, a prod, some tidbit of inspiration to start the string of words. If I know what I want to say but don't quite know how to say it, maybe I'd like some help with that. My perfect text editor is one loaded with sources of inspiration and reference at my fingertips.

MuseWriter features: It's all about the refrigerator poetry magnets

Remember that refrigerator magnet poetry set your Volvo-driving aunt had when you were a kid? I imagined a useful muse might be a widget that could crank out unique sets of words extracted from random articles. I looked into this and found that David Bowie was particularly fond of this method (which he had gotten from William Burroughs), and while I was disappointed to not be pioneering the method, I was sold on its potential. After building this tool, it has turned out to be one of my favorites in MuseWriter (hint: it's the widget called kaleidoscope).

I also wanted dictionaries and a thesaurus to share the same screen. A rhyming dictionary would be nice too. After this, how many syllables is each line?

Finding writing inspiration from our (soon to be) AI overlords

Natural language processing with AI is a rapidly growing field, and there are some cool tools out there. Sure you can pimp Google Docs with add-ons that tap into some of these technologies, but add-ons can have cumbersome interfaces and often come with questionable privacy policies. As a programmer I want an excuse to play with NLP tools, and as a writer I want to put them to work with little friction. Instead of a standard thesaurus, how about being able to generate a list of associated words and not just synonyms? How would an AI finish my sentence? How about an AI using a language model trained on classic rock lyrics or hip hop?

MuseWriter hands you all the tools to explore these things. It's a simple text editor inspired by what Medium uses, and it is surrounded by widgets that can do all kinds of interesting things while you stay on the page and in the zone.

I'm excited to see where this text editor goes and am looking forward to feedback from the people who find this useful (or not). In the meantime, I can no longer completely avoid writing song lyrics with the excuse of building software to make the job easier instead.