Who am I writing (songs) for?

Continued from yesterday:

A few years back I wrote songs.

They were for no one except myself...and maybe God.

Sometimes I share a secret ambition that other people would hear them and think they were amazing and tell me so. However in general these songs were written just for myself and for no one else.

However I went to university and something changed. I stopped writing songs.

Well more precisely I stopped finishing writing songs, I could come up with a little riff or chorus but I couldn't advance.

I'm not sure why exactly but at the same time I started to do some open mic nights at university and also found myself leading worship for the CU on a few occasions. So playing music became public for me.

Maybe I decided that my songs weren't as good as the professional musicians songs that I was singing [and they weren't] or maybe it was something else but I could no longer write a song.

And so this continued and I basically gave up trying to write songs. Until this year.

This year I set myself the challenge to write a song and put it up for public display to explore this side of me again. But I haven't and it has really frustrated me that I can't seam to finish/like anything that I write, certainly not enough to put it on the internet.

And so I read these things and realised that I have been trying to write songs for the wrong people...basically you. Really I should just write songs for me again, like I used to.

They may suck but they will be for me and to be honest that is all that matters.

So I may put some songs up on here...I may not. If I do then they'll probably be really bad but hey they'll be something that I've done.

Who am I writing for?

It is amazing how many coincidences you can sometimes have in a day.

Today my friend Andrew Brims wrote a blog post about the need to take a rest from busyness, especially online and issued a reminder that to be creative we need to apply ourselves to make this happen.

Just before this I had found a link to a person who had given away a free E-book on writing online (and all I, or you, had to do was sign up to receive his blogs weekly update. Bargain!) It was amazing how it seamed to speak and challenge me about my own creativity and motives.

A while back this blog was a political blog, sometimes pulled a few hundred visits ever day with it's various snipes at different political views and issues in the local news. I even moved across to Blogger to try and actually make some money out of this.

Fast forward to a few months after the election and when I moved across to the Ukraine and I realised that I had lost something. The joy of getting views had turned to the pain and lament at the lack of views I now received and my inability to write about UK politics due to the fact that despite having the internet at my fingers I was increasingly out of the loop and unable to make wise or insightful comments on the issues of the day [partially due to lack of time, partially through a sense of political disenchantment and wondering what I actually did think/feel in the current political climate.]

So I stopped.

I changed and started writing for the pure joy of writing [and the desire to keep people back in the UK up to date with what I was doing.] Writing became fun again although the monthly updates of blog stats and similar continued the reason was less for me after all I could see these without sharing them] and the fact that I would now at best get a couple of hundred page views a month and mostly from the same people didn't matter. I enjoyed writing and trying to write in a new a different way.

I think. and I hope you agree that my writing has actually improved during this time period. There is certainly a lot more of me held within the text that you see on the pages now. But I guess that is for you to decided.

The really interesting thing is when you compare this to my attitude to music. {to be continued)

Drawings Paintings and Photos

One of the things I love about drawings and paintings is that often the artist inserts something of themselves into the picture of drawing. After all you could get 5 artists to paint the same building, person posing or even the same picture and there would be something different about each painting that would reflect the artists.

But can this even be true of Photos? After all they are still only taken from one perspective and it just happens to be the perspective that the photographer happened to be at or choose to take the photo from. If you look at the type of photos that my brother takes, compared to those that I take then you can clearly see the difference. Partially this is down to his ability with a camera but it does also include his personal style that he throws in too.

So what I’ve been wondering is do we actually add in something of ourselves into whatever we do or make.