Composing to me, is very much like telling a story, and I’ve found it really helpful to think of writing in this way. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end. Each musical idea might represent a character of the story which may appear and reappear at different times. Continuity is really important in tying the whole song together, otherwise it could end up sounding like a bunch of ideas crammed together with no real connection between them.
One great example of how to take a theme and develop it is in Beethoven’s fifth symphony. The opening motif dun dun dun daaaa.....dun dun dun daaaa. Beethoven uses that motif over and over again. He moves it around in different intervals in the main melody, and orchestrates the supporting melodies using the same motif as well...
Some people have this idea that writers often go out and look at a sunset and then come back and write a masterpiece. I’ve never had this experience yet, nor do I know of many musicians that work that way...lol. Most composers will tell you that the first 10% of writing is inspiration, and the next 90% is perspiration... in other words, it’s one thing to get an idea for a piece, but much harder to bring it to a completion. What blocks many writers (including myself) is that they want everything they write to be a masterpiece. They might come up with an idea and immediately say “this sucks” and discard it without trying to work with it. If you look at composing from the perspective of a sculptor, they start with a block of material that doesn’t look like anything to begin with. They slowly pick and chisel away at it, removing bits here, and shaving bits there....until the end result is a beautiful piece of art.
When I was in grades 6-8, I had an art teacher named Miss Burke. She would give the class a drawing assignment of some kind, and after doing so, she would walk around the room very quietly and peak over our shoulders to see how we were doing. I have no problem admitting that I was (and to this day still am) a terrible drawer. I would usually find myself restarting my drawing dozens of times before it resembled
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