Ed Sheeran Mental Model For Writing And How To Get Unstuck from Writers’ Block
If you’ve been hard on yourself for how shitty your first output of idea is. After this piece, you just might have a second thought and be convinced it’s normal. And also, discover a proven system that even Ed Sheeran alluded to using. Without a doubt, we both know the output of his works. Global chart-topping hits.
He explained how shitty things get before you begin to get it right.
Not just music, I’d discovered this process works for all creatives because what you’re reading is birth by this same process and I’ll tell you how but before getting into how the process works, let me tell you how I stumbled on it.
I challenged myself to publish at least four medium posts this month (piss poor I know, considering there are guys out there doing double of that).
But yeah four-piece a month equals one piece a week. Unfortunately, I’ve been short on ideas. I’d been surfing videos on youtube and consuming lots of emails from my subscribed list to no avail. Then I wrote a few. I deleted them because I felt it wasn’t standard. No one would read. And Without mincing words, it was shit.
I bookmark lots of sites on my browser so I decided to tap in and I came across a piece by Julian Shapiro titled Creativity Faucet. If you don’t know who he is, Chances are, you probably make use of one of his creations if not more daily.
He’s the founder of Demand Curve — a Y combinator startup that grows other companies. He runs a growth agency supplying talents to firms like Microsoft, Basecamp, Jumble, and Zendesk.
He came about velocity, a web animation engine used by Samsung, Uber, WhatsApp, and several more.
On Self Indulgent Writing
In his posts, quoting him verbatim
“writing for yourself is the quickest path to writing something others love. Because you’re proxy for your die-hard audience’
He continued…
‘I write the first draft possible as quickly as I can. Because almost all the work happens during rewriting”
He concluded saying…
‘Get a bad draft done so you can spend 95% of your time rewriting”
Pretty much self-explanatory. I found myself going back to my drafts and rewriting what I once considered subpar. The more I do this the more I noticed my writing and ideas start to get better.
On Idea Formulation And Validation
Julian calls it Creativity Faucet. He explained further using a water pipe in the process of achieving clarity. In verbatim
He said
“Just like a backed-up pipe of water, the first mile of piping is packed with wastewater. This wastewater must be empty before clear water arrives. Because your pipe only has one faucet, there is no shortcut to achieving clarity other than first emptying the first wastewater”
Ed Sheeran alluded to using the same process while writing his songs which the majority has gone to break records. In one of his interviews, he said
“If you switch on a dirty tap, it’s gonna flow out shit water, in a substantial amount of time clean water is gonna start flowing as long as it gets out, you’ll get fine.
With songs, you’re gonna write shit songs at the beginning, my songs were terrible, I was listening to it the other day, it’s awful, but I got it out of me, and the more and more you write, the more and more you experience it, then you start flowing clean water. Songs start getting better and better, when you’re on a good streak, you’re writing good songs now, then, you write a shit song and the song is out of you, now you can move on”
He concluded saying…
‘It’s the same with gigs, you’ll always play bad gigs in the beginning, that’s what you need to do and then, the more gigs you do the better you get, now you have a shit gig but it’s alright ’cause you’ve got it out of you and you’ve experienced it”
You see, before penning down this post I had absolutely nothing running through my head, zilch. No idea what to write about but I knew I needed to write something. I started writing and here we are. My hope is that you get to spot and run away with the point this post is intended to pass across after consuming.
And if you’d like to read the complete blog post of Julian Shapiro explaining Creative Faucet, go here
Also, if you’d like to watch Ed Sheeran’s interview speaking about his writing process, go here.
