Q: I struggle between choosing to spend my time coming up with new ideas or finish existing ones that I started. I want to have a goal of 1 new musical idea per *reasonable amount of time*, but I don't know how to prioritize between investing time into new things when I have ideas outstanding that need attention. Do you have any suggestions/have you experienced this? thanks
A: basically what i did, when i was first in your situation, is to just keep coming up with new ideas. let them pile up. This is probably because i may have had a fear of not having enough ideas. Then it rapidly became a problem. Another thing i began doing is writing songs entirely on paper, and i would demand to finish the whole thing in 1 session. That's one way of dealing with it. so i wrote more and more and more. Sometimes they wouldn't get finished, sometimes they would. Usually if it was shorter, it would get finished. but they all got put into the list regardless. more years went by with more writing like this. It was more rare that i would ever record any of them. Eventually when the problem became even more serious, i finally found a way to work on the existing ideas. This is a whole separate task from generating new ideas, and i still consider them separate. For a couple years i ONLY did 'middle writing', which is where i work on existing ideas. Then a few months later, as i was getting ready to start recording some of them, i did a few weeks of finishing, just finishing writing for songs. I could talk for years about the different systems i've used for SELECTING which ones to work on. And this is not even to discuss selections for the recording process, which you didn't ask about. Eventually as enough years go by, you start to feel your life running out, so you probably take drastic measures. Nowadays, for me this is how it works: new ideas can come any time, that's always true. Sometimes they even come in dreams. So i catch them whenever they arrive, and i don't really do a writing session at that time because it's usually not the right time. but you just try to catch as much as you can. That's totally separate from any writing process or work process. Separately from that, it is a linear process of working toward the item i am releasing next, and i work on that 1 item until it's done. For songs, first what i do, at the beginning of a project, i do a round of new song idea generation, but this is NOT necessarily promising that any of these will be the one that's used. This is just to ensure that i am giving myself a chance to generate new ideas, which might have a chance of getting picked. So i generate some new ideas, maybe 10 or 15. Sometimes i use various different methods, just to make sure i've given myself a chance to try various things. Then, when that's done, i do song 'selection', which is where i'm going to choose which one is going to be recorded, for the next release. This selection is made from the ENTIRE list, which includes the new ones but also includes all the other ones, which are all at various levels of completion (writing). Once a selection is made, then it's quite simple. I finish the writing all the way, first, then record it, all the way. then make the video, all the way. I should clarify that this procedure didn't become solidified until after many many many years of ambiguity which may be similar to what you are going through now