Madman-Architect-Carpenter-Judge (in that order!)

Betty S. Flowers, an English professor at the University of Texas at Austin published an essay in 1997 entitled “Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge: Roles and the Writing Process.” Although her essay was directed to prose writers, the concept is even more useful for songwriters.

Flowers identifies four different personas who come into the writing process sequentially. Writing begins with the madman, who brings ideas and energy to the page, uninhibited.  Just write down any crazy thing - let imagination run wild for ten minutes and don’t stop to edit. Next comes the architect, who looks unsentimentally at the madman’s “wild scribblings,” selects the chunks that could possibly form into a song, and arranges those nuggets into verses, refrains, etc.

Along comes the carpenter, the craftsman, who does the detail work of making sure the lines are similar in length, the rhyme scheme is consistent, the words have an internal rhythm, etc. He nails the ideas together.  Finally, in comes the judge, who inspects the work, critically.

Writers get tripped up, Flowers suggests, when their judge gets in the way of their madman.

“So start by promising your judge that you’ll get around to asking his opinion, but not now,” Flowers writes. “And then let the madman energy flow. Find what interests you in the topic, the question or emotion that it raises in you, and respond as you might to a friend – or an enemy. Talk on paper, page after page, and don’t stop to judge…”

I believe many blues songwriters allow the judge to enter the process too early – he rules out topics and modern language that “don’t belong” in blues songs.  And perhaps we allow the architect to limit the song structures to blues forms that have been built over and over again in the past. Blues does have limits – but we could allow the madman to finish his part in the process before the other members of the team have their turn.