Austin City Limits

I’m not a fan, it simply came on after I’d watched another program on PBS from my computer and I was too lazy to get up and shut it off. Real-life, I guess.

Anyway, this has happened twice and both times two sets of women songwriters were featured. This last time it was Sharon Van Etten and Lucy Dacus. Now to be fair they were not new to me. I’d actually downloaded from the Apple store their songs. I just didn’t know it was them. I was simply responding to “hey, I like what I’m hearing” and downloaded.

So it was nice to hear these singer/songwriters in context. After the Sharon Van Etten set she did an into the camera 2-minute response about her music and process. She said she riffs. Ends up with 10-minute long “songs” which she afterwards begins to shape, pulling out lines, turning them into lyrics. It’s only after the riffing or vomiting on paper that she begins to see a story, or understand the point she wants to make.

I get this because it happens to me all the time. I’ll wirte a short story or novel and I have no idea of the point I want to make, or if I have, or if I did is it the same one the reader comes up with at the end. Thr answer to this is mostly always no.

I usually have no idea of where I’m going. I’m like a hitchhiker that got into a car, hoping to end up somewhere different.

All this to say: each of us have our own process. For Sharon Van Etten it’s working. For me, I’m still refining the approach. For any of you who are hoping to write or currently writing, it means that you do not have to have all the answers. Just follow the creative process. Put it out into the universe, and then hope that the cosmos leads you to a solar system, a place where you can pull something out of the black hole. Find sustainable life.