Traditionally, there have been “unspoken rules” governing what composers should and should not discuss in public forums. Looking back through my posts to the SCOREcast website, I see a theme in my work that suggests I like to break the rules. I guess it is inline with my original idea when I started the podcast back in 2006. I simply wanted to help other people getting into this business understand some of the lessons an independent composer might learn — both positive and negative — on this path of self-discovery that we call “scoring films”, the ultimate goal being to bring to the forefront some of the issues that we composer types hate to talk about… and start talking about them.

After three years of doing this, and having now had so many great film music veterans chime in with their thoughts too, I now know for certain that those “unspoken rules” are cold-blooded career killers. There is no doubt about it. The insecurity of the “never let them see you sweat” attitude that pervades the composer culture nowadays is a poison that has been systemic in turning our community into a tiny hive of solitary-confined worker bees.

Composing, especially the realm of independent composing, has always sort of been a “vacuum” career. You create alone, you hustle alone, you produce alone, you interface alone, you fight to be paid alone, and in the end you celebrate alone or suffer alone, depending on the outcome of all of your former suffering. The good news is that it changes as you ascend up the proverbial ladder, and as you become more successful, the model shifts into more of a team thing where then you are managing (and being managed by) a group of people who are all out for you, and you for them. But until then, it’s all you baby!

So… you’re alone. What could be worse than that, right? How about being alone with nothing to work on? Now THAT sucks! The thing is that it’s going to happen. It’s not matter of “if”, it’s a matter of “when”. At some point, no matter what you do, there are going to be times in your career when you have no projects in sight. It could be right now (maybe you’ve not worked on anything yet), or maybe you’ve been somewhat successful in the past and now, all of a sudden, you are facing a drought with no oasis on the horizon. It is during these times that it is hard as a composer for picture to stay motivated. Then you add on the “aloneness” factor, and things can get real dark real fast.

Often for us… Composer + No picture = No motivation to write. Therefore, it just stands to reason that… Composer + No picture + Nobody = No motivation to go out and get a picture to write to. At that point, it’s basically Dead Man Walking.

The concept of the suffering artist is not new. How many times have you heard it said that we all, as artists, “suffer for the sake of art”? The trick is, however, to learn to learn to use the suffering to your benefit, and most of all, to learn to use the suffering to your benefit when it matters most… when there is no project on the horizon — to stay motivated during the doughts. It sounds silly, but it is so true. There is often no getting around the suffering part, and there is definitely no getting around the drought part either, but just like the literal, real-world version of it, suffering during a drought can lead to death. You have to have the internal fire to get yourself through it and keep forging ahead, in complete faith that the next thing is simply around the next bend.

I would offer that “motivation” is the internal fire and thus the antidote to “suffering”.

Developing the Disciplne of Self-Motivation
People ask me all the time how I stay motivated when there is nothing in the pipeline. How, in a career that is powered solely by my will to get up in the morning and power through, project or no, do I stay excited to do so? The simple answer is this: I’ve been doing this long enough now that the schedule I keep (lining up my next project at least by the time I’m recording my current one) combined with my love for the craft is a natural motivator. However, the answer nobody wants to hear is that over time I’ve developed a strict regimen of “motivation maintenance”, and I apply it daily in my life. This is something that I’ve learned out of listening to others that have gone before me… namely my father, Don Ogden, and my amazing manager, Michal Marks. My Pop has given gems of wisdom since I was old enough to retain cognitive memory and my manager is an ass-kicker who never lets me whine for more than 30 seconds about how tough life is. She’s always teaching me new ways to get back up on the horse, and my dad taught me to “have” a horse to begin with, so there you have it.

The truth is that maintaining your motivation to create is actually a long-term journey. The first steps in that journey can be hard, but with discipline and consistency comes the reward of achieving motivation through minimal daily maintenance — a simple matter of learning to do the right things at the right time.

We are all different people, made of different levels of “chutzpah”, therefore there is going to be a different path to perpetual motivation for me than there is for you. It is going to be up to you to find the path that works best in your life, but I can promise you it will be made of a combination of listening to your gut, knowing your abilities, and learning how to coax, negotiate, and even trick yourself into being creative. Here, then, are some fundamentals that I have learned that will keep you traipsing through the sand during the next project drought that comes your way.

1) Know Your Targets
It’s literally impossible to stay motivated if you don’t know what you are trying to accomplish. You have to have goals. To me, goals are targets. Targets have to have identities. Name each project. Give it an identity, even if it doesn’t come with one already. Treat it like it is a person standing in your studio watching you work. You cannot hit your targets when you don’t know what they are.

2) Realistically Pace Yourself
You’ll lose interest fast in staying motivated if you fail a lot when you are first trying to develop your creative momentum. Keep your targets small enough that you can hit them with some modicum of regularity, but large enough that you aren’t underwhelming yourself creatively. Maybe short films are the way to go in preparation for your first Hollywood feature. Perhaps a web series would be a great starting block if you want to get into TV eventually. These “smaller” targets will help you prepare for the bigger ones waiting for you when you are ready. They aren’t going anywhere! Be slow and methodical. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

3) Protect the Nest
Your studio is not a place for preparing your taxes, doing your online banking, or researching airline fares for flying home this Christmas. Make your studio a sanctuary of peace, tranquility, and music-making… ONLY. Ask any composer that has had any amount of success doing this and they will tell you, “You need a place specifically set aside to be creative in.” After you set yourself up in that creative space, spend time in it daily (or nightly if you are working an additional day job) and make sure you are there at the same time each day. After awhile, you’ll start achieving creative success in that space, and once you do, your brain will start associating creative success with that space. The next thing that will happen is you will only be able to be “creative” there, and your studio will become a power-center in your life.

This is not some weird-ass cosmic thing I’m talking about here… so don’t flip out and think I’m from Satan! I’m simply talking about using your studio as a place of creative power rather than another room in your house, or a space in a rental facility… a “necessary expense” to keeping your career moving. Your studio is much more than that. When I go in every day to the Musicave, my brain clicks into “create” mode, because that is all I’ve ever allowed my studio to be – a creative “laboratory” for my musical science experiments.

4) Give It Time, but Don’t Give It Up
If you encounter a situation that seems insurmountable, give it a day or two if you have it to give, but do not give up and just lay down and die to it. No problem (and certainly no project) is ever truly insurmountable. Put problems and obstacles away for a second, but always come back and work on them later. Often times, you’ll have more info by then, a better perspective by then, and a better idea of what to try that might be the catalyst for a breakthrough. My dad always taught me that “Everything is always better after a good night’s sleep.” He is right. Take a break, take a nap, take a vacation if you have that kind of time… but never ever take the easy way out by quitting or giving up. Quitting is not characteristic of a winner, and to be successful in the film music biz being a winner is Film Composer 101.

5) Identify Your “Power Band”
I hear my partner in crime Lee Sanders talk about this concept all the time. Each of us has a time of day where we are most creative. Just like your body needs to sleep at certain times and eat at certain times, your brain also needs to be creative at certain times.

Your brain has a creative “power band” and (unfortunately, an uncreative one, as well). My power band is in the wee hours of the morning, between the hours of 4 and 9AM. When everyone in my house is asleep, I seem to get the majority of my creative work finished.

I realize that the majority of composers reading this will disagree and say that their “power band” is at night and maybe even into the wee hours of night – completely opposite from me, and that’s totally cool. It’s whatever you know it to be. And… it could change as you grow. My creative time used to be at night when I was in my early twenties, and even still I have to pull the occasional all-nighter to get something delivered on time. But whether it is early morning, late night, or in the middle of the day after you eat a healthy lunch, you need to find and identify what time of day your brain is at its most creative, and then make it a point to create during that time. Reserve the least creative time of the day to do the things that you know even a monkey could do, but need to be done, nonetheless.

6) Use the Right Tools
Have you ever tried to use a butter knife as a Phillips head screw driver? C’mon! Yes you have! We all have. It seems like it would work, but it doesn’t work so well. That’s because in order to turn a Phillips head screw, you need a Phillips head screw driver. That type of fastener was simply made to be used with the right tool.

I observed this in action repeatedly by watching my father and my grandfather work together in our family’s floor covering business. It never really hit home with me, however, until the day my father bought me my first professional drum set. After laying out over $4,000 of wages earned by crawling around on his hands and knees laying carpet in strangers’ homes, he looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, “To be great, son, it helps to have the right tools.”

That lesson has stayed with me since, and after years of writing and playing music while using the tools of the trade that we all use, I cannot stress enough how true that really is. Working with the right gear makes all the difference. Conversely, working with inferior gear causes pain and heartache, and ultimately, when the stakes are critical, it will cost you jobs. You simply cannot afford to scrimp on your studio or your instruments. I have been a professional studio drummer for 30 years, and I’ve played about every manufacturer’s drums that can be played. I’m not lying when I tell you that playing a custom-made and hand-crafted kit is so much easier and musical than playing a cheap assembly-line kit that anyone can buy at the local Walmart. I bet Tiger Woods would agree that playing with the best-made clubs he can find makes “thinking” about his game way easier.

When you don’t have to worry about your tools, you are free to worry about the stuff that matters. Don’t cut corners here. Buy the best you can afford. Always.

7) Monitor Your Progress
I know people who cannot wait to wake up, log into IMDb Pro, and see if their “Star Meter” increased while they were sleeping. True story.

While it might seem a little bit self-absorbed, I understand their excitement to a certain degree. Monitoring your progress can be excellent motivation to either do better, or keep doing what you are doing. Either way, stop and self-evaluate every once in awhile. Nothing but good can come from it, and since nobody loves you enough to *really* tell you the truth anyway (American Idol much?), why the hell not?

8) Get Out in the World
While your nest will serve as your creative space, the world can serve as your “inluential” one. I’m a tea drinker, so many times I’ve set up shop in my local Coffee Bean to work on the more mundane tasks that our job demands — emails, invoices, payroll, website development, SCOREcast article writing… Just kidding! The Coffee Bean might not be as cozy and “cocoon-ish” as the Musicave is for me, but it provides an atmosphere that effects me differently than the Musicave does, and allows me to be influenced by things that will eventually find their way into music. Remember that we are responsible for supporting dramatic emotion in a musical way that every human hopefully can relate to. If we don’t surround ourselves with humans every once in awhile, we’ll almost certainly lose touch with the reality of human emotion and behavior, and then our music could become dry and empty.

9) Pay Attention to Your Peers
It is often helpful to listen to the work of others and pay attention to what others are up to. However, proceed with caution here… I ONLY do this to make sure that…

#1) I’m not reinventing the wheel. Why do stuff your way when someone else has found a more efficient way to accomplish the exact same thing? That’s not innovative, that’s just plain stupid.

#2) My work is up to industry standards. You cannot turn in mediocre mixes, tracks with artifacts in them, or stems that are in the wrong formats and resolutions because industry standard delivery specifications have been established that will not tolerate those things. Find out what the standards are and either adopt them, or go one step further and make yours a level better.

The reason I say to only pay attention to others in these two instances is because if you constantly watch what everyone else is doing, then sooner or later you snap out of it and realize that only THEY have gotten music written while you have been standing there like a dumbass drooling over their accomplishments! You haven’t done a thing!

So, be careful… keep your finger on the pulse of the industry, but don’t get so interested that you lose time.

10) Do It Anyway
Last thing. This might be the most important one.

When you don’t feel like writing, write anyway.

Force yourself to write. I mean, look… it’s what we do. We. Write. Music. At first, it will seem awkward, clumsy, forced, and futile to just write when you feel you have nothing to write. After awhile though, you will start to feel your groove returning. You might still think what you are producing is the biggest bunch of noise in the world, but honestly… when you are in a funk, you aren’t the best judge of your output anyway, so who the hell are you to say what is good when you think everything in life sucks at the moment? Do you see how silly that is?

When you feel blue, write it. When you are happy, write THAT. When you are angry, write THAT. When you are scared, write THAT TOO! Just write. Just start doing it. Nine times out of ten, your creativity will come rushing in and you’ll have three more cues in your library by the end of the day. Your momentum will return and you are back on that horse!

And believe me, that horse (life!) will do everything it can to buck you off again… but maybe next time you’ll have the right tools to know what do.