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[jfb]

From the Neil Gaiman essay that Ken and Angus (on Lynn's blog) have been talking about:

The Ideas aren't the hard bit. They're a small component of the whole. Creating believable people who do more or less what you tell them to is much harder. And hardest by far is the process of simply sitting down and putting one word after another to construct whatever it is you're trying to build: making it interesting, making it new.

I'm not a prolific songwriter, but I've written some songs, and I've written most of them three ways:

• Under a deadline. My deadlines are self-imposed, to varying extents: I was going to a wedding and wanted to write a song for the happy couple. I was going on a trip and wanted to have a CD to sell. I had an open mike slot at 9:15 and didn't have any songs I was in the mood for.
  
  
• In a frenzy. When emotions run high, songs start coming out--about the emotions, at first, but the songs twist into their own forms, and the sparks fly everywhere. "Helium," a straight-up love song, came directly out of a crush. From the same intense week I got "Josephine," a creepy song about a girl who is awaiting her transformation into a butterfly. Who knows? The energy is the key.
  
  
• By working. Too rarely, but effectively, I adopt a simple discipline: Every day, before I allow myself to check email or do anything else, I'll spend an hour writing. Not "practicing," not "improvising," not even waiting around for the muse to strike. Writing. Writing anything.

All of these have their charms, but the last seems the most sustainable, and really, the easiest.

As for the other part, yeah, I've got notebooks full of ideas. (Gaiman's talking about Big Ideas; I've got some of those, but mostly the notebooks hold phrases and rhymes.) Every once in a while one of them sprouts a song, or gets grafted onto one. Most of them will never go anywhere but the page they're written on, and that's okay. New ideas keep coming. The hard part is sitting down and turning them into songs.

Comments

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Doing something poorly is sometimes a really really long route to doing it better. This is part of the cause of my procrastination, I think. Rewriting is sometimes harder than writing it right the first time. (It's also the cause of a whole lot of really ugly code that I run across at work, that's been festering for 15 years but isn't technically broken so no one fixes it. But maybe that's different—code refactoring is actually pretty easy, it's just that no one has chosen to make it a priority.)