Little Beginnings Everywhere

David Byrne, Ernest Hemingway, and the importance of leaving yourself fragments to build on.

Those of you who listened to my “How Ideas Happen” conversation with David Byrne will know from my introductory remarks that I was a bit concerned about how applicable Byrne’s thoughts might be for non-musicians. Despite the fact that Byrne’s career has spanned many different forms of media—from writing and singing Talking Heads songs to his current immersive theater project, Theater Of The Mind— I felt like I had to ask him about his creative process as a songwriter, given that that particular craft is what he has been most celebrated for. (And as an amateur musician, I had an enormous personal interest in his answer to that question.) But I worried a bit about how generalizable his techniques would be, if you didn’t happen to be interested in composing music.

One example of this limited applicability is a point in our conversation where Byrne talks about writing songs initially with nonsense lyrics — working off some intuitive sense of what phonemes are appropriate at each moment in the song, and then going back and trying to find the right words and meaning to fit those pre-linguistic raw sounds. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of writing songs that way—it is apparently a very common practice—but I’m not really sure how that particular approach would be useful for, say, an architect sitting down to work on plans for an office building, or a software designer trying to dream up new features for their app.

But then at the very end of our conversation, Byrne said something that I found genuinely inspiring. Here’s the exchange:

Steven: Do you have a method for capturing fragments of ideas that you then go back to to expand into a song?

David: Oh yeah, yeah. I have text things; I have things right here on my desk. I have just a few lines; sometimes I have just the title of a song that comes to me and I write it down and I go: “expand on that, I think there’s something there.” And then I also have in my computer here a whole lot of musical ideas that have maybe a melody — a nonsense word melody, awaiting words.

Steven: And do you just sit down in your home studio noodle with the record button on?

David: Sometimes, sometimes I do that. But usually I need something to start with. It might be in some cases a lyric that I’ve written already. Or I might start with just a rhythm. That’ll help. It’s hard to start from nothing. So I’ll accumulate all these very little beginnings, and so that means when I come back, I’ve got something to build on.

I was immediately taken by that image of Byrne in his home studio with “little beginnings” scattered everywhere. What a lovely creative practice to try to maintain. I think it resonated with me because it sounded a little like the slow hunches and spark files that I’ve been writing about, on and off, for more than a decade now. It speaks, I think, to the importance of keeping fragments around, hints and clues and half-baked impressions. But also the importance of revisiting them. Instead of sitting down at a blank page (or an empty ProTools audio session), go through your collection of little beginnings, find one that strikes your fancy, and start adding new layers to it.

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There’s a superficial connection between Byrne’s little beginnings approach and one of the more famous examples of writing advice in the canon, courtesy of Ernest Hemingway:

“The most important thing I’ve learned about writing is never write too much at a time,” Hemingway told his protege Arnold Samuelson. “Never pump yourself dry. Leave a little for the next day. The main thing is to know when to stop. Don’t wait till you’ve written yourself out. When you’re still going good and you come to an interesting place and you know what’s going to happen next, that’s the time to stop.”

I don’t know whether I first adopted this strategy after reading about Hemingway’s approach, or whether it was something I stumbled onto myself, but it’s definitely a technique I use almost every day when I’m working on a longer project. (Maria Popova has a wonderful post that covers more of Hemingway’s advice to Samuelson.) Wherever I stop at the end of the day, I leave myself a little shorthand description of what’s coming next—almost like a bullet points version of the next few paragraphs. That way, when I return to the computer the next morning, I’ve got something to build on, as Byrne puts it. It’s a handy little trick, and it helps ward off the tendency to procrastinate by re-reading the entire chapter you’ve written. Right out of the gate, you’ve got a clear signpost—maybe even a few phrases that you can use—for what comes next.

But Byrne’s little beginnings actually suggest a more radical technique, I think. It’s one thing to be in the middle of a long-form writing project, and “leave yourself a little for the next day.” But what if you made a practice of treating your ideas like Byrne’s musical fragments. Instead of picking up a stray rhythm or chord progression lying around your desk and building on it, what if you made a routine of choosing one old entry in the spark file—some passing “note to self” that you wrote months or years ago—and then devoting 30 minutes to trying to improve on it, flesh it out, or take it in a new direction?

In an early installment in the creative workflow series here at Adjacent Possible, I wrote about the small but powerful feature that Readwise implemented, where the service emails you every morning a collection of semi-random quotes from your reading history. It’s one of the more powerful serendipity engines in my own workflow. I’m sure there are tools out there that can do this—please share in the comments if you know of them—but it would be wonderful to have a version of ReadWise’s stochastic memory that would serve up your own hunches from the past, so that you could metaphorically noodle on them with the record button on. (Or perhaps take them out of rotation, if they proved to be dead ends.) Each work day could begin with the current to-do list, the action items for mature projects that have clearly defined objectives; but it would be supplemented with some fragment from the spark file, an idea too early for the official workflow, but still worth expanding on. A system like that one might lead to a virtuous circle as well: you’d be more likely to leave yourself little breadcrumbs of ideas if you felt confident you were going to encounter them again in your wanderings.

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