Passion Project Reflection
What I did for my passion project was I knew that I am very passionate about writing songs and poetry. Seeing as writing songs from written poetry is how some people are inspired to write songs, I thought this would be a new experience for me. For this project I had remembered back to an album idea that I had a while ago and thought that this might be the perfect opportunity to begin writing this album. The idea of this album was to write letters to certain themes. The themes that I chose to write about for this project were Dreams, Death, and Happiness. I had written poetry about these themes and from that I had written some of my favorite lines or lines that I thought were perfect for being a whole verse for the song. I had taken lines from the poetry or sometimes added in my own lines and wrote my songs. I wrote these songs about Happiness, Death, and Dreams, and had described these elements as people with characteristics. I was able to write song lyrics and will complete these songs, though I wasn’t able to display the chords or melody because I didn’t have them, I was able to display the lyrics and poetry at the exhibition.
Some challenges that I had encountered during this project was I think that one of my struggles was inspiration. Though I was super excited for this project and digging deep into two different mediums that I really do love, I was having trouble writing the poetry and songs. Not only was it just because I had writer’s block, but it was hard to not judge myself. I didn’t think that my words were good enough or that when I tried to begin writing the melody or the chords I thought that they were too generic and overused in my previous songs or with songs just in general. I didn’t think that what I was writing was good enough so I had stopped and had tried again, but didn’t like the direction of what I was doing. How I had moved on from this challenge was, instead of focusing on just one element and trying to finish one poem or one song in one day, I had focused on different elements when I felt that I was stuck and didn’t know what else to write. I just worked on the other poems and had gotten inspiration from those themes and would come back to the poem or song that I was writing before and had gotten stuck on.
What I am most proud of for this project was being able to try something new that I knew would be very challenging for me before I even started. A lot of times I have tried writing songs from old poetry that I had written, but with being able to focus on both the songwriting and the poetry writing in different ways, I was able to come up with lyrics that I had pulled from the poems or lyrics that I had come up with myself and it had turned out really well. I was also very proud of not only learning something new by finding a new way to be inspired, but also for being able to find new ways of encountering problems and finding a new way to get around problems by working on other aspects of what I was working on for this project and just getting back to what I wasn’t inspired to write. I was also proud of myself being able to come up with an intriguing and beautiful way of displaying my work which I didn’t think I could do before, but I was glad that I displayed it the way I did. By not only making it beautiful, but making it an interesting and relateable way to display my work so it wasn’t just sheets of paper on a table.
Some challenges that I had encountered during this project was I think that one of my struggles was inspiration. Though I was super excited for this project and digging deep into two different mediums that I really do love, I was having trouble writing the poetry and songs. Not only was it just because I had writer’s block, but it was hard to not judge myself. I didn’t think that my words were good enough or that when I tried to begin writing the melody or the chords I thought that they were too generic and overused in my previous songs or with songs just in general. I didn’t think that what I was writing was good enough so I had stopped and had tried again, but didn’t like the direction of what I was doing. How I had moved on from this challenge was, instead of focusing on just one element and trying to finish one poem or one song in one day, I had focused on different elements when I felt that I was stuck and didn’t know what else to write. I just worked on the other poems and had gotten inspiration from those themes and would come back to the poem or song that I was writing before and had gotten stuck on.
What I am most proud of for this project was being able to try something new that I knew would be very challenging for me before I even started. A lot of times I have tried writing songs from old poetry that I had written, but with being able to focus on both the songwriting and the poetry writing in different ways, I was able to come up with lyrics that I had pulled from the poems or lyrics that I had come up with myself and it had turned out really well. I was also very proud of not only learning something new by finding a new way to be inspired, but also for being able to find new ways of encountering problems and finding a new way to get around problems by working on other aspects of what I was working on for this project and just getting back to what I wasn’t inspired to write. I was also proud of myself being able to come up with an intriguing and beautiful way of displaying my work which I didn’t think I could do before, but I was glad that I displayed it the way I did. By not only making it beautiful, but making it an interesting and relateable way to display my work so it wasn’t just sheets of paper on a table.