1 small book on how to stay inspired and surprise even ourselves with our work
My New Year's reading recommendation: Jeff Tweedy's songwriting book is a guide to the broader creative process for nearly anybody.
The turn of the year is the season for book recommendations, and I have one that hit me just last week.
No matter your profession or hobby, I imagine at some point all of us have felt stuck on a project and wondered what to do:
This looks like a mess; where do I go from here?
I don’t feel inspired in the least—how can I continue?
Do I even have the knowledge and talent to finish this job?
I’m simply out of ideas; what’s my next move?
I could fill the page with this sort of self-doubt, but you get the drift.
I consider myself to be a voracious reader, especially when you factor in news sources on my smartphone and about 30 years as a print subscriber to the New Yorker. I constantly read multiple books at once, but rarely do I encounter a volume with the combination of brevity, clarity, and universality as Jeff Tweedy’s “How to Write One Song.”
I’m late to the ballgame. Tweedy, most famous as the frontman and driving force of Chicago band Wilco, first published this book in 2020. I belatedly blazed through it last week after receiving it as a holiday gift from a sister-in-law.
It’s only 158 pages and cuts a modest figure on the bookshelf as a hardback of 5 by 7 1/2 inches.
But if you love creative problem-solving or a creative pursuit of any sort then this may jostle you into fresh avenues of thinking.
Even if you consider yourself to be more of a technical brain focused on streamlining product, or a business manager obsessed with P&L, I’ll bet this is useful. I’ve spent significant time in the news business and corporate brand marketing, and this book should apply equally well to both those worlds—and many more.
“How to Write One Song” is philosophically deep yet rhetorically plain and direct—similar to a great pop song, appropriately enough.
As Tweedy puts it, he hopes his recommendations are “applicable toward a generalized atmosphere of making things.”
Yes, they are.
I was struck by how his little tome effortlessly threads together so many great lessons and tidbits of advice I’ve collected throughout my career and creative life. I found myself nodding along page after page.
The book helped me realize how much of my life I’ve spent discussing creative strategy and process with an expansive cross-section of thinkers:
Generations of news publishers, editors, and broadcasters.
Business owners and leaders of all stripes.
Politicians from across the political spectrum.
Filmmakers such as David Lynch.
Television executives like the late, great Norman Lear.
Music icons such as Paul McCartney and Bono.
I’ve also devoured plenty of books on the creative process and related disciplines—especially the writing craft.
I’ve spent time dwelling on some of these issues in classrooms and conferences, whether serving as a professional-in-residence at the University of Iowa or studying at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.
The book is organized into four sections. The first section that sets the stage for how to make creativity a daily practice should be most useful to people in all kinds of roles. But even when Tweedy delves into more specific ideas for writing lyrics and melodies later in the book, he’s still ultimately dissecting how and why we create anything.
Without robbing from the book, here are examples of several ways the book inspired my own thinking. These statements are my own—not Tweedy’s. He might not frame them in quite the same way or even agree with them, but they’re examples of how this book sparks inspiration:
1. You have to love the process or craft of what you do, not only its result or payoff.
As Tweedy writes, his “book’s basic premise is to help you find a process and an inclination to be absorbed into that process enough to have it reliably result in” the outcome you want. For Tweedy that happens to be songwriting. For you it might be writing a Substack post or novel, assembling a PowerPoint presentation, editing a video—anything. Ultimately, loving the nuts and bolts of your process is crucial for you to feel fulfilled and want to keep creating.
2. Through patience and persistence you can work yourself into a ‘flow state.’
To be in a flow state is to be so utterly absorbed in your work that you maintain focus, generate ideas more easily, and maybe even lose sense of time. Late in the book Tweedy expresses his skepticism at the concept of “writer’s block.” He echoes my own long-held belief that it doesn’t necessarily exist. “It isn’t really a block; it’s a judgement,” Tweedy says. In other words, sometimes you have to silence your inner critic and ego—the ultimate reason for the block—to make progress by putting whatever ideas on the page you can muster. Tweedy conquered writer’s block by earning his living by nothing but writing songs. I spent years chasing news deadlines that didn’t care whether I was inspired. If you can find a process that keeps you productive, over time you should find it easier to enter a flow state.
3. Work with the rhythms of your body and brain to feed your inspiration and creativity.
Like so many creative people I’ve talked to, and consistent with my own experience, Tweedy recommends leaning on your subconscious as one of your best allies. If you focus on your challenge at hand shortly before bedtime, often you’ll wake up having made some sort of progress toward a solution—or maybe fired up by an entirely new direction. Or maybe you need to go for a walk and focus on your project as your body settles into a different rhythm.
4. Exploratory technology such as AI makes this book only more relevant.
If I didn’t already lose you by claiming that a book about writing one song actually is a guide to clearer creative thinking in any field, then I may lose you now: Tweedy—without even trying—has written a great book to help you mesh your creative pursuit with cutting-edge tools such as large language models.
Why?
His entire book in a sense could be seen as a guide for how to query our own mind with all its hidden motivations, mistaken assumptions, and untapped potential. It’s sort of prompt engineering for our creative souls. By the time I finished the book I couldn’t help but think that it was full of hints both micro and macro for how to better bring AI into the loop of a daily creative practice.
Maybe this is my favorite ‘self-help book’?
Keep in mind that Tweedy, like many successful artists, wasn’t formally trained. He can’t read or write music, yet he has spent his life supporting himself and his family through songs. His awareness and acceptance of the multitude of creative paths available to us is largely born from his experience in forging his own.
I’ve been so effusive about this book I probably should go out of my way to clarify that this isn’t a paid promotion, and I’ve never met Tweedy.
Maybe I got so worked up because I’m generally not a fan of the self-help category (one of the top 10 book genres). I tend to dismiss these books as riddled with cliches, jargon, and painfully obvious advice all in service to the hard sell. Tweedy is about as close as I get to the “7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” Maybe finally discovering a new non-religious book I believe could improve most people’s daily lives is making me swoon.
Or maybe the book helped me hit a flow state long enough to churn out a mediocre Substack post.
Regardless, I know how so many of you out there struggle to (1) make progress on your pet projects, (2) stay inspired, and (3) juggle too little time among too many priorities.
This one small book isn’t a panacea for your creative soul, but it’s at least fun and freeing.
I don’t even care if you write a song, but that probably would make Tweedy happy. I don’t want to completely co-opt his book as a universal self-help guide.
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