Something To Respond To
Prompt engineering yourself to creative breakthroughs
I took a songwriting workshop last month with my favorite songwriter alive today, Scott McMicken of Dr. Dog.
One of the points he made early in the month was to “give yourself something to respond to”. The idea is that the empty word processor, Digital Audio Workspace environment, or IDE suggests that you must conjure something from nothing in order to get a worthy result. Instead of that, starting with something already there, no matter how tiny or unrefined suggests that your job as the artist is to respond to what is already there. You respond with your instincts, creative sensibilities, likes and dislikes.
For example, one of our first “assignments” of the class was to write a song about the moon. That week, I didn’t sit down with my guitar trying to conjure a vibe out of thin-air. I made a playlist of moon songs I loved and compiled imagery and thoughts about the moon. My task was defined, I just had to execute it with my personal style. We did this sorta thing three times during the month, and I came out with three pretty decent demos made, not effortlessly, but enjoyably.
Starting with something to respond to decreases the activation energy for creativity1. This might also be related to why it is so much easier to describe what you don’t like about other people’s work than it is to describe what you want at the outset. Everyone can be a critic, it is much harder to be a producer. Without even considering execution, it is much more difficult to describe what you are envisioning from scratch than it is to describe the ways something in front of you is not what you are envisioning. What we love can be described by what we don’t love, our preferences can be articulated by articulating what we don’t like. As a brief aside, this is a useful tool if you are having a hard time defining goals or plans for yourself. Instead of asking “what do I want to invest my time in this year?” you can instead ask “what things do I absolutely not want to spend time doing this year?” I often find this negative approach much easier. I am not sure if that is a human thing or a me thing, but try it.
Giving yourself something to respond to is an antidote to creative block. If you set out to make a piece of art, starting with a single sentence can catalyze new directions and a prolific surge of artistic productivity. You may hate the sentence, and therefore set out to create the opposite sentence. The sentence may create a word ripple in your head, inspiring a cohesive atmosphere or narrative. Herein lies the value of prompts, creative exercises, sampling and seeking inspiration. In many ways, this is what creativity is — simply generating a response to the material of the world. But in practice, we don’t log reality in a way that makes it easy to start responding quickly or coherently. Articulating why a sunny day is beautiful isn’t what we need to do to notice a beautiful day. By doing that somewhat clunky work of translating the world into concrete material to respond to though, you can get creative momentum much quicker than you would by simply hoping the swirling potion of your observations and sensibilities bubbles into something tangible. This is also why writing can help you discover entirely novel thoughts. You aren’t articulating thoughts already inside you, you are prompting your way to novel thoughts one sentence at a time. It can be mysterious and wondrous, in my best essays I am surprised by the resulting thoughts. But doing this is actually very pragmatic.
I also am realizing this is one value of notetaking I never articulated — taking notes is giving your future self creative prompts. Looking back on the ways you articulated reality (ideas, reminders, poems, random thoughts or journal entries) will undoubtedly inspire new insights with the benefit of hindsight. When you are seeking ideas for a new project, you'll have a goldmine of past curiosities that will be leveled up by the experiences you've had since you wrote them down. You are essentially creating a stash of inspiration for the future, or what James Currier and Kevin Kelly called the network effects of ideas: having ideas leads to more ideas.
I’ve decided to exercise this practice in two new exciting ways. The first is in the realm of songwriting specifically. Inspired by the class with Scott, I spun up a new Substack to send out one songwriting prompt a week. We’ve currently had two prompts and some great tunes made from them!
The second is a new series of posts I want to try.
I will pick one book from my shelf, at random, and flip to a random page. After reading the page, I will respond in a free-wheeling sort of way and publish my responses. Excited to see if this is fruitful. I think it will be fun either way, even if the hit to miss rate is less than favorable. The first book hasn’t been decided for me yet, so if you look at the photo above and want to pick that would be awesome!
Giving yourself something to respond to is the practice of utilizing existing material (whether that is a group of words, a photograph, a song) to generate new material from the reservoir inside of you. This is like prompt engineering yourself and is remarkably effective. Don’t start from scratch, find something to respond to.
I think as Artificial Intelligence tools and prompting become more pervasive and natural, many more people will become much more prolific.
Love your writings. Can hardly wait for your next thoughts and observations.