My writing has become lifeless! What's going on!?

I recently started a website about music, partly to help me practice my writing skills and partly to help spread the word about awesome music. My site is mostly made up of album reviews. This is where I had the most fun in the beginning, describing the sound of a song, it was very cool...until I had to do it over and over and over and over hundreds of times. Now I have found that my writing has gotten really blah and informative rather than passionate. Here is a sample of some of my early work:

" "Closer" is the kind of song that I fall in love with all over again every time I hear it. It is the perfect combination of sexy,eerie,mesmerizing,and hypnotic. Songs like this set my creative mind in motion and make me imagine worlds I have never seen with my real eyes. With many layers of instruments interweaving with each other,Closer successfully performs a slow build to a cataclysmic barrage on your senses,putting the listener on the edge of their seat without even realizing it. After it is over,they feel as if they had just ran slow motion through the universe and came out on the other side breathless."

...and here is a recent example of how my writing has become blah:

" "Nine in the Afternoon" was the first single,which I think is one of their best songs. Also check out "Northern Downpour","That Green Gentleman",and "Pas de Cheval" ".

As you can see, I've lost my spark. So my question is...is this a result of just running out of all the words I could possibly use? Or is this the result of taking something you love as a hobby and trying to make a job out of it, therefore all the life gets sucked out of it? I have very little desire to keep my website going because of this, and it's scaring me because I want to write for a living but I can't figure out why this is happening, my 2 favorite things in life are music and writing so when I combine them, why does the excitement fade so quickly?

Actually, I should mention this. It isn't that I don't love to write about music, but maybe it's just the style that my website is in. It's set up to be informational, the program I use highly recommends your site be informational in order to keep bringing in visitors. As I'm sure most of you know, when you write it's much better to just let it flow out of you from the heart. I don't know the correct avenue to take with this. I love music and writing but how can I combine them both without having this problem happen again?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions or advice anyone has!

Thanks for the suggestions everyone! I think it would be extremely hard for me to write up an essay or a full page of anything with bands I'm not very familiar with, the research alone would take an hour or two and then trying to figure out a way to word it myself would take just as long. I think I'll go with what Ruth said and just do the basics for every band and then if I feel strongly about anything I'll write up that underneath it. That's also what some other people have told me, on a different forum.

Thanks everyone!

Dale Emery said:

I'm pretty sure it's not about running out of words.

At the moment you wrote each review, how did you feel about the music?

Dale

Click to expand...

In the beginning when I first started my site, I felt excited and it came out so easily. Now it's hard for me to feel excited, I feel like I'm rushing through it to get my site done faster (it's only about 20% done because it takes up to 3 hours to do one page). It makes a little difference how well I like the music I'm reviewing, but even if it's one of my favorite bands, I feel now more like I'm writing it to get it done. It feels like a job now rather than something I'm doing because I want to do it.

bettielee said:

First, in order to reanimate, or "zombify" your writing, you're going to need an old priest and a young priest....

Seriously though. Have you tried reading or writing poetry? Maybe that sounds lame, but sometimes poetry can spark things in us that regular prose doesn't. I write mostly fantasy, but when I am having trouble with words just leaving my head and getting on the paper, I start with lists of words, then go on to write poems with the list of words. They are dumb at first, then fun, then I am writing real poetry, then I am enjoying writing again, then I come back to my writing with a much fresher mind. Sometimes, I just read other people's poetry. There are also some lyricists that I find very inspiring, and that might help you, since you are into music.

Click to expand...

Yes I have been writing poetry for about 25 years! That always flows right out of me because I'm creating something. I seriously thought I wanted to be a music journalist which is partly why I started my site, to get practice, but the more I do it, the more I realize I should probably write to create, not to review music. So I'm thinking I should write books, articles, and poetry.

caitlin_constantine said:

Well, I wouldn't think that you would have to write the equivalent of a term paper when doing this in order to make it good. One thing I think would be interesting would be to put a bit of yourself into the pieces of writing. I don't necessarily mean the strong emotive writing. Like, what does the song remind you of? Where were you when you first remember hearing the song? Do you have any associations with the song?

Honestly, if I wanted basic information about a song or an artist, I'd go to allmusic.com. The key to having a successful site is having something unique that can't be found anywhere else. More often than not I find that "something unique" is the personality or the style of the writer.

Just my two cents.

Click to expand...

Well the program I'm using to make my site recommends that your page be informational, not like a blog where you just ramble on about your opinions on stuff. So the way I'm doing it is actually the way you're supposed to do it. And I realize my site is basically a lesser quality Wikipedia, but I'm only following the rules of the program, according to them your site is guaranteed to be in the top 3% of all websites if you do everything right.

Andreya said:

Hm, maybe write or do something completely different?

This may charge you with excitement & enthusiasm again - & then maybe go review again?

As for the program - are you talking about SEO optimizing or something?
There are some tricks to that, as far as I know (am by no means an expert though) - but if what you write is boring to write & read, does it help any if your site is ranked high in the Google search?

Honestly, if you have a unique name & lots of keywords repeated, your site is bound to be high up on Google anyway, as far as I know.. (do a few searches & see..)

Or did you mean something else by 'in the top 3%'?

Also, maybe find an easier programme to do a page quicker? just an idea..

Click to expand...

No the site I use is called SBI, and it's $200 per year, it's that good! The owner's daughter started using it when she was like 10 years old and she's a teenager now and already rich! I can't do this without the site because it walks you through each step, you don't have to know a single thing about html to use it, so it's the only way I could have my own site. Yeah the top 3% of all websites...but you have to use it perfectly, it's not foolproof.

I think what I'll do is just change the way I write my pages, and not try to force any emotion if there is none there.

merly said:

Do you do this because you want to, or is it the money? If you are doing what you truly love, then keep going. If you are doing it for money, unfortunately others will call the shots. If neither, then you have some decisions to make. IMHO as a nobody

Click to expand...

Well I am not getting paid from it (yet) so i'm not doing it for the money, I started it because I wanted a way to share my love for music with people who want to learn about it, and I also wanted to practice reviewing music because one of the things I wanted to be was a music journalist, so it was a way for me to get my feet wet and also have something to show in my portfolio to help me get future writing jobs.

caitlin_constantine said:

I was going to ask that. I was a bit confused when I read that she wanted her site to be in the top 3% of sites - which, by the way, as someone who spent several years in the world of web sites, I tend to be leery of guarantees like that - because I wasn't sure what she was hoping to accomplish.

Click to expand...

Well it isn't that I am striving to be in the top 3%, I honestly don't care, as long as I have regular visitors to my site and can make some extra money off it. I do need to earn something because I am not going to find a good paying job like my last one so in order to prevent me from moving back home I need to have some kind of supplemental income that doesn't require me to actually have 2 jobs.

Heroine26 - If you are interested in getting experience as a writer and having a bit of a portfolio to show potential employers, then I would suggest you consider not following this program. If the HTML is an issue, then perhaps you could try a blogging program like WordPress or Blogger, which doesn't really require those who use it to be fluent in HTML.

Click to expand...

Well I can't just stop the program, I've already paid my money for the year and I am not going to just stop it considering all the time and money I've put into it. I don't have to know HTML though, the site builds itself, really. And I'm SO close to the point where I can start monetizing so I really can't stop now or I'd really be losing out.

Another thing you could do is check out music oriented sites, like venuszine.com, which is always looking for people to write reviews of shows and CDs for them. That's a good way to get experience and to get your name attached to an actual publication.

Click to expand...

Ooh I've never heard of that one! I'll check that out. I have looked into other sites though, that I knew about, but none of them needed anyone. I did email a few sites and never heard back.

If you are trying to make a bundle of money off your site, then that is a different story, but again, I would be skeptical of such claims. You'd be making money off of ad revenue, and as others have already said, the writing required for that kind of site is not exactly the kind of writing music publications are falling over themselves to get their hands on.

Click to expand...

Well, there are tons of ways to earn money other than ad revenue, and there are more people making bundles of money than not, but that is all irrelevant because I don't need to be rich, I'm just using it because I will get way more traffic than I would using a blogging site and not knowing a thing about blogging. And the writing style can be any way you want it to be, I just have a site very different from most of them but I can change it too, which I am in the process of doing.

I didn't mean for this to be a discussion about my website, it wouldn't matter if it's posted on there or if it was posted on a music review site, either way I'd still be reviewing music, and that's where my problem lies, and that's why I was starting to think maybe my strongpoint is creating stories, not reviewing something.