Room for Creativity

6th February 2019

Having reached a dead end with all of my ‘music in the community’ based ideas, I have decided to give up on this line of thought. The reason I was keen to suggest some of my own ideas initially was because the pieces I was being asked to write at Exposed were often short descriptive pieces which didn’t give me much room for creativity or personality. To remedy this, I decided to write a longer personality piece in my own time: a review of the highly revered Marc Rebillet set I saw at The Harley, which can be found under ‘Case Studies’ on my website. I found writing this piece enjoyable but surprisingly difficult – I have never written anything like this before, so I had no idea how to structure it or what kind of information to include. In a way, it was nice to be able to experiment with this piece of writing in my own time and without the added pressure of it being published with Exposed – if Exposed had asked me to write this piece I probably would have panicked that it wasn’t good enough or it wasn’t the ‘right’ style.

1st March 2019

As time goes by I am given more responsibility from Exposed (for example, I have arranged and conducted phone interviews and I am sometimes asked to research and plan the content for the magazine). I have also written a few longer pieces, including an album review, a press-release for Sound Junction, and a band interview and write-up, so my worry about not having enough substantial content is becoming less of an issue.

With it this brings new challenges – I often struggle to know how long I should spend perfecting my writing as I am very aware of the deadlines. However, I’m sure a sense for this this comes naturally with practice.