There are few things more aggravating than sitting down to write once you have finally found time to, and find you can't due to some reason or other. Many of the usual irritations can be avoided, though, if you take the time when you can't seem to put instrument to paper or whatever medium and actually write and do little things that will help you later. Here are a few ideas you may not have thought of that you can use.
SOUNDPROOF YOUR FUN SPACE
Soundproofing your music space is always a great idea. Not only will it help you keep your lease if you are in an apartment, but it can also keep you from hearing noisy neighbors that might ruin your creative mood with their din. This is pretty easy to do if you have a closet that you have created a space in for a desk and/or equipment-just pile boxes of winter clothes, old magazines and other fluffy things against your common walls. Another inexpensive method is to hang some of those cheap foam dimpled mattresses, flat side towards the wall-I was shocked how much I could hear from the neighbor's home when we finally moved out and took ours down. If these are in a more public room, I've found covering them with nice lengths of coordinating cloth looks nice, too, and you can paint long 1x2 boards to match your other furniture to help hide seams and hold the foam up better at the same time. Doing this with other important common areas can help, too-I am trying to soundproof my hubby's den as well as our bedroom, simply so we can't hear the partying neighbors all hours of the day and night-I have found this cuts down on a lot of couple tension, both by destressing a stressful situation and enabling people to get more restful sleep. All of these can cut down on tensions that can keep songwriters from getting their work done.
KEEP EXTRAS AROUND
When you are writing, you should always have good materials around in case you will need them. For most of us, that means a sharpener and sharpened pencils or pens that actually have ink in them, floppies or CDs to dub things onto, plenty of room on a hard drive and the operating system disk nearby in case there is a crash, tapes for recorders, strings for guitars, extra batteries or adapters for equipment that uses them, and so forth. It also is often a good idea to keep an extra instrument around in case one shorts out and you really don't want to waste writing time doing repairs. It only takes a few moments out of each day to make sure there is something there, plus a backup in case you run out of something-having your pen run out and then only find a thick nib marker as backup can work, but it sure makes the job tougher. It makes more sense to make sure there are always two tapes present, and more if you get on a roll and use up the first two and still need more.
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