Blog: Copious Content Creation

Hiya!

Over the past week I’ve had a ripple of commonality come through multiple times between multiple conversations with several different friends of mine, the issue of content creation. All parties involved, in each individual dialogue, are singer-songwriters, none of whom are signed or have any sort of team behind us pumping out content on our behalf. The complaint that we each had was just how long it takes to make scrollable content & how taxing it can be to constantly be in that mode of creation that has to be, by nature, a tad frivolous.

If you're not someone whose job depends on how many eyes are on you at a given time this whole blog may come as a surprise to you, but content, in any form takes a long time to put together. I’m going to show you a few examples along the way to help illustrate this point but just know, that’s what you’re in for on this blog.

I’m going to start with a few examples of my own. Let’s talk about blogs. These ones, these one off, ten to fifteen paragraph numbers that I do almost every week take me on average an hour & a half to two hours. If that seems like an odd number to you then let me break it down. If I’m being honest, the days leading up to Friday are spent brainstorming, coming up with ideas for what this week’s topic should be & typically going with the one that feels the most natural or that I feel the most passionate about. We aren’t counting that time in our final number here simply because my ADHD’d brain allows me to do that while I’m doing other things. It’s not dedicated time, but it is still taking up mental space. Then I set aside time to sit down & do what I’m doing right….now! right…..NOW! which is typing out the blog. If there are specific points that I want to hit along the way I’ll type them down below in the order I want to present them in so that I know which way to steer this whole stream of consciousness train, otherwise I derail. Oh look, Squirrel!

Next, after my ten to fifteen plus paragraphs are done, which usually takes over an hour, I go in & edit. After I’m satisfied with my post, or at least deem it passable, it gets uploaded to square space with tags & categories, & all that good stuff. Then I’m still not done. I have to share this mother so that you all will see it. I post it to Facebook, swapping back & forth between my personal & artist page, I make an Instagram story post, & I post it to Twitter (& now I guess Threads too). All of that amounts to the total time of an hour & a half to two-ish minimum. That’s a completely different story for travel blogs.

Travel blogs take me days. I honestly don’t know if I can calculate just how much time goes into them but I have written about this in the past as well. For a travel blog I first have to travel which, yes is fun, but the way I do it, to be able to share an experience that others will want to immolate, I do a lot of research first. I find restaurants, activities, cool locations & dives, & put together a loose itinerary for my trip, broken down (again, loosely) by day. There are certain elements that are higher priority than others on said itinerary that get shifted around as needed.

While on the trip I have to be sure I’m making content; taking videos, taking pictures, writing down where I went, what I ate, etc. I keep a running tab over my whole stay that I refer to throughout my time writing these once I’ve returned. If I’m diving I have to go through & edit the video I took, as well as take screen shots from said videos so that there’s underwater photo content to attach here. That’s usually a several hour endeavor. Then I have to repeat the above blog process all while linking the places mentioned within said blog. Then after the written portion is complete I go in with the photos, upload them, & position them so that they look all nice & pretty. Truly travel blogs take me daaaaaaays to do & that’s even after I split them up into two to three day parts.

Then there’s music. The average songwriting session lasts around three to four hours & often you don’t get to finish the song in its entirety. After that you have to go in & do rewrites for lyrics or melodies that don’t quite work. As far as production goes, there’s tens more hours thrown in. Tracking all takes place in real time but you need to do multiple takes & then also go in & edit said takes. Equalizing, adding effects, mixing, mastering, etc, etc, I would guesstimate that most songs have a minimum of twenty hours thrown into them even before you start promoting, doing photoshoots for promotional content, reaching out to different publications, playlists, etc.

Going back to what each of us were specifically talking about with content creation is video. The first conversation I had was with Leena Regan who put together little highlight videos from the writing camp that Songbird Society put together. Each thirty second video took her around five hours to complete. You have to go in, edit the clips, color correct the clips, pick a song to have them synced to, sync the cuts in the video to the beats of the song, write a personal, catchy caption, share it everywhere you can.

Kate Cosentino was talking about the same thing, about how exhausting it is to make content for scrollable sites like TikTok or Instagram that you pour hours into just to have it be seen by a handful of people. Throwing your efforts into the void, hoping to catch someone’s attention enough to engage with them, failing & having to do it all over again.

For my Tarpons video I had to find a karaoke track of Feed The Birds from Mary Poppins to sing over, rewrite the lyrics to be about tarpons, record & edit vocals, then sync my dive footage up to the beat changes of the song. Probably a good four to five hours of work & the video went nowhere.

All of this is not meant as a poor poor me type of thing. I write all of this to make you all aware, to show you what it looks like to be a modern artist trying to promote yourself in hopes that one day you’ll have a team behind you who pays someone else to put hours of their time into these posts instead of cutting into your already limited time. I also write all of this so that maybe you’ll be a little more loving to the content people put out, especially your friends! These videos that make you laugh or smile or cry take time & work. These songs that you put onto your shuffle & never listen to with intention again take time & love & effort & are snippets of people’s lives! These blogs, especially the travel ones, take a lot & we do it because it’s what we love, but when you’re constantly throwing yourself out there into the oblivion & finding yourself fallen short each time it gets incredibly disheartening. That’s what causes creators to stop, that’s what causes musicians & artists to sell their gear, causes creatives to get a desk job, because they have tested their metal against the void & the void has swallowed them up.

If you’re here, reading this blog I’m so grateful for you. If you listen to my music, share my posts, anything that supports me in even the tiniest bit as a creator & an artist, I thank you. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you. You never know how far a simple comment, a like, a repost, a whatever else that takes five seconds to do means to someone in our field. Please be appreciative of the content creators in your life, without them this life would be so damn boring.

Much love as always,

-C

Object Writing: Fireflies

The mid-summer haze plants the seed of their terrestrial bound, celestial display. Lofted delicately into the air by humidity & paper thin wings they begin their musing spectacle of courtship. They paint ever shifting, continuously rearranging constellations upon the evening air, flashing their messages of availability & attraction, pining for those hidden in the vivacious green below. These fireflies are the first signal of summer; the first indicator that Ostara has ended her great, bounding resurrection & has passed her revitalized bounty off to Sol, lengthen the days & bleeding warmth into night. I’ve always been overjoyed by the presence of these, their comfort hangs in the air along side the heat of the day, enrobing me in a truly childlike sense of imagination & wanderlust. It’s my greatest pleasure to know them & an indescribable gift to witness their light.

Object Writing: Bedsheets

Through the soft silver glow of the crescent moon I watch your breath rise & fall. Like waves rolling gracefully under a midnight sky I am transfixed by the steady expansion & regression of your chest. Shadows dance lovingly across the muted gray linens that adorn you, their proprietors gently wafting in the midsummer breeze holding vigilant watch of the darkness from the other side of the window. It appears this will be yet another night where Morpheus has chosen to ignore my prayers for rest, but tonight I do not mind, for in his absence he has gifted me a view few on this earth have been fortunate enough to hold. I cradle the pillow tenderly between my forearm & crown & fix my eyes amorously upon you. Your hair falls indiscriminate upon your brow as you slip further into the realm of dreams with each passing aspiration.

Blog: Forcing Creativity

As songwriters the message that we seem to have drilled into our heads over & over again is that in order to be successful in the writing realm, or in music in general, you have to be able to force creativity at any given moment. While on the surface I don’t entirely disagree, you do need to “show up” to do your job. You need to be able to walk into a room, especially when writing for a major artist, & pull a quality song out at the drop of a hat. It’s a scenario I am sure a lot of us are familiar with even in the non-musical world, the need to tap into the creative on the fly, but something I’ve found that is next to impossible to get on demand is that of inspiration.

Inspiration & creativity often go hand in hand, especially where the art world is concerned. It tends to hit like lightning & fade quickly. The trick of striking while the iron is hot can be a difficult one. Inspiration, unfortunately, often comes exclusively from life experience. It comes from living, failures or successes in love, stories that invigorate you, adventures that flex your sense of wonder, etc. Inspiration is not something that can be faked or forced & when an attempt is made to do either it ends up being abundantly apparent.

I’m going to once again refer back to a writing camp that my dear friend Leena Regan put on, if you’ve read any of my other blogs you’ll know that bring up often. In said camp Leena really hammered in the point that if, in a writing situation, you feel like you’re pulling teeth, stop immediately. It’s a mistake I’ve made in the past for sure & I’m sure a lot of us who create have made as well. The problem that ends up arising when you force your way through painful creation is that it completely saps the joy out of creation. Your piece ends up being soulless, heartless, lifeless. It ends up being a stand in that you lock in a drawer & never look at again.

I was discussing this very topic with a producer friend of mine, Joshua Gleave, last night! We were both talking about how we feel it’s a complete & utter waste of everyone in the room’s time to try & juice a song from the pulp of your brain if the spark just isn’t there. He said that he’s had writes where he & his co-writer got a verse & chorus into a song, both looked at each other & immediately said “nah,” calling the session. I’ve definitely had the same, but I’ve often found that going from a different angle ends up igniting the fire of inspiration.

I was in a write back in October with my friend Frye & she & I had the exact same experience as Josh did above; we got a verse & a chorus in & were like “nah.” Nothing wears your creative brain out faster than writing something you’re not feeling at all or creating something you have no attachment to & know will end up going nowhere. We did end up getting a song out of that session but it was one that ultimately we both felt incredibly drawn to & inspired by.

I ended up getting burned out of writing for this exact reason. I stopped looking forward to writing because it felt like a chore, & not a fun one at that. I had always been told what I mentioned at the top of this post, write to write so you can write more & write better. I don’t disagree that we should flex our creative muscles on the daily, no argument there, but I don’t believe that has to take the form of torturous forced “mea culpa” style “inspiration.” You can be creative in other ways! Greet your day with some object writing, paint, draw, dance, sing, play an instrument, do something that gets the neurons of the left side brain firing. You can flex & maintain your creative muscles by broadening its definition for yourself & simply creating to create.

I’m sure that any of you in the virtual audience who are songwriter currently reading this can attest to the following; the best songs I’ve ever written were those I never planned to write & most of the time they were those that just came pouring out of me like lava. In addition to that, most of the best co-writes I’ve had were those where we’d either given up on writing, taking the pressure off, or had just been goofing around. Pressure, to me, brings instant death to inspiration.

Please, please, please don’t burn yourself out creatively the way I did! Find new ways to integrate your art into your life, to get the juices flowing. The songs will come when it’s time for them to, I promise, but you must be persistent & patient with them!

As always my loves, have a fantastic weekend!

-C

Object Writing: Biscuits

The crumbs lie lazily scattered around the base of the package; let’s call them little remnants of a midnight snack consumed half awake. Their trail extending from the ripped opening of which now only a trivial few fractions of the original tantalizing contents remain. It was clear from the moment I'd opened them, during my initial purchase, that this package had previously been dropped; the silvery wrapping had given way to the crumbled bits of cookie within still loosely holding tight to their uniform means of presentation. The hours of night that crept into morning had made way for the soft vanilla & caramel accents of the biscuits to waft delicately into the air & pique the olfactory of any happenstance passerbyer. They weren't my favorite, though, I guess, the haste at which I had ushered them into my shopping basket the day prior would have said otherwise; I guess I'd just had a hankering for something saccharine & carbohydrate laden. I finished the remainder of the container with passive indifference before discarding the scrapes & the undesirable bits into the trash. Great way to break fast, I thought to myself as my gnashing turned sugary tack into mush. Great. Way. To. Break. Fast.