Break Through That Writer’s Block with Song Stories
It really does work
Neil Gaiman once said that he didn’t believe in writer’s block, but that he did believe in getting stuck as a writer. That’s easy for someone as prolific as Gaiman to say, but he may have simply been trying to take the dreaded phrase “writer’s block” out of our minds and vocabulary; after all, being stuck is not as demoralizing as being blocked. It’s a comforting idea, but from a practical standpoint it doesn’t help much if you’ve been staring at a blank page for days on end.
Personally, I have gone to some extreme lengths to break out of a writing slump (I’ll join Neil in not calling it writer’s block). I’ve said novenas to St. Francis de Sales and burned incense in front of a statue of Ganesha (the Catholic and Hindu patron saints of writers, respectively). I’ve swapped the laptop for legal pads, pen for pencil, writing at my desk for writing outside. I’ve even changed the music I listen to while writing from the Born to Run album to The River (drastic, I know).
Ironically, one of the best ways I’ve found to break out of a writing slump was first suggested to me on this site. I’ve complained about everything from plummeting earnings to the loss of the profile bobbleheads here on Medium, so it’s only right that I mention something good as well. The answer to my own slump a couple of years ago was writing “song stories.”
Writing prompts are everywhere, of course, and some of them are incredibly helpful. I once broke out of a slump using a prompt from the sadly now-defunct literary magazine Postcard Poems and Prose. The challenge was to write a story of 600 words or less that incorporated the following elements: the title of an Alice Munro story, two words you did not know previously, an unusual Main Character name, two lines from any Edna St. Vincent Millay poem, an Oscar Wilde quote, and an obscure line from a favorite song. It was a cool prompt, but it only worked that one time.
The part about “an obscure line from a favorite song” resonated with me, though, because I love music (Springsteen in particular, in case I’ve never mentioned it before). Using song lyrics has one drawback, however: copyright issues. What I had not considered until two summers ago was using song titles, which cannot be copyrighted and thus are fair game. Enter Aimée Brown Gramblin and the Music Story Challenge.
The challenge was a simple one: write a story using as many song titles from one band as possible. It doesn’t seem like this would be a way to break out of a slump, but I can assure you that no matter how blank your mind may be, once you start pondering ways to fit Judas Priest song titles like “Living After Midnight,” “Victim of Changes,” and “Night Crawler” into a sentence, the creative juices start flowing in spite of themselves. The result of that exercise for me was the story “Metal Gods.”
If you’re a Priest fan, you recognize that even the title of my story is one of their song titles. I find it easiest to pick a song title and use it as the title of my story, simply because it gives me something to build the story around. I wrote another song story that incorporated 50 (yes, 50) Springsteen songs. For my title, I used the song “Meeting Across the River” from the Born to Run album; in a nice bit of serendipity, the theme of that song matched up perfectly with the backstory of the main character of my The Last Word novel series. Starting from that premise, I wrote a short story that was essentially a prequel to the events in the first novel.
I’ve also used song titles from The Smiths for a story with a college theme. I didn’t know it would go that way when I started, but since I first started listening to them in college, the songs triggered memories that resulted in a fictionalized account of a frat party gone wrong (remember, everything can be used as material for your stories).
The most recent song story I wrote that I’ve actually published (most of the time I don’t publish them) used song titles from the criminally underrated band The Cars. That one resulted in the most meta story I’ve ever written, with some of my fictional characters crossing that ethereal boundary into real life. It’s one that will seem weird to a non-writer, while writers will get it immediately.
The best thing about this prompt is that you’re using something you already love: the music of your favorite artists. The memories associated with those songs will naturally surface, consciously or subconsciously, helping drive the story in directions you might never have considered without the music jogging your memories. It’s also a little like solving a puzzle, figuring out how to fit those titles into the story in a way that flows rather than feeling forced. If you do it right, most people won’t even realize that there are 30 song titles in your story unless you tell them (or unless they are huge fans of that band).
So give this a shot the next time you find yourself in a writing slump. It’s also a fun thing to do if you’re in between projects and want to keep writing every day (as we all should be doing). In fact, go try one now; I think you’ll be both surprised and pleased with the results.
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