On writing

Last night I went to a book signing by an author I was introduced to last year, Patrick Rothfuss, whose second book just came out. It was great, he's really funny. And he was totally amazed at how many people turned out. He read the prologue to the new book, but mostly it was a Q&A session, and he's great to listen to because he launches into rambling stories all the time.

Anyway, one thing he said stood out to me. I didn't hear the question, but by his answer it must have involved authors who say something like "the book really wrote itself". His response (which in his usual rambling fashion veered off into comments on parents of unruly children) could be paraphrased like "That's BS. You can't let a book 'write itself', you have to TAKE CHARGE of it. YOU are the one writing it!"

Here comes the music part...

It occurred to me that I had a realization just like that in the last year or so regarding my music. Many times in the past I've felt that my songs "wrote themselves". But every time I compare my music to the stuff I listen to that I want mine to be similar to, it comes up short. Countless times I agonized over this: what the hell am I missing and why can't I get the result I want?

Then I had kind of an epiphany. When I let a song "write itself", what I'm really doing is using musical bits that are so ingrained in my mind that they come out without having to think about it. The problem with that is that usually when something is that ingrained it's because it's so common. So I'm really just writing a song with the most common, standard aspects that I'm used to. Henceforth I shall refer to this as Lowest Common Denominator Writing. It's just like the author was saying: one has to TAKE CHARGE of one's writing. Otherwise you're just producing rehashed crap.

Of course, for me that's a constant struggle. I keep having to step back and ask myself "am I writing this or is it writing itself?" Many times the answer to that isn't the right one. I'm sure there are people out there who can let a song write itself and come up with good music, but clearly those people have more talent than me.

Thoughts?

Yes!

Brilliant topic, and I know exactly what you mean...but from a slightly different perspective.

Did you ever hear the line "Writing comedy is serious business?" Well, every AES I write "The Anderton Awards" for Pro Sound News. It's a parody of awards shows, but not TOO much of a parody, because I really do choose items that are worthy of awards. However, I try to come up with humorous contexts, categories, etc.

Now, I didn't set out to write this as a yearly thing. I did it one AES as a lark, everyone had a good laugh, end of story (or so I thought). Next year..."Hey Craig, doing an Anderton Awards this show?" Uh...okay.

Well, I'm not a comedy writer, I'm a tech writer. I really sweated over those pieces, trying to make it look easy while parsing every word. One year I finally thought "No one cares about this, who am I kidding?" and I didn't do it. Well, both PSN and I got a ton of complaints about "Hey, where were the Anderton Awards this year?" So I resumed and have been doing them ever since.

But I have to say, it's the toughest writing I do. Nothing I write ever writes itself, because I'm a crap first draft writer. I am a good editor, though, and I can eventually beat my stuff into a useable form. But writing comedy is...serious business. It's the writing that I have to take control over the most, just as you said. If I just put the first draft out into the world, my reputation as a writer would take a major hit

Not exactly music-related, I know, but it definitely supports your point. Thanks for bringing it up, definitely food for thought.

Of course, you can take it to the other extreme as well, in which everything is thought out to death and nothing is heartfelt and true to you.

What I believe in--which is along the lines of what Craig wrote above--is to suspend your inner critic at first and let it flow. Then, go back and see what works and what doesn't; and proceed from there.

By the way, "letting it flow" doesn't have to mean flowing from your well-worn comfort zone; it can mean flowing from experimentation. It is possible to create anew from that place rather than regurgitate.

Best,

Geoff

I agonize over my songs. Often changing words and lines for months..Tweaking them until they are perfect. Crafting your writing is no different than crafting songs both musically and lyrically speaking. Songs do not write themselves and neither do books. I'm sure there are geniuses that can {censored} out greatness but I've never met them. All the Geniuses I have met actually work harder than everyone else. That's why their stuff is better.

There's inspiration and there's craft. Some of my best lyrics have been through inspiration. On rare occasions, I've written a complete set of lyrics in 10 minutes, and I haven't wanted to change a word. Likewise, on rare occasion, I've nailed a compelling melody, or a cool lick with chord pattern off the top of my head.

But, almost never has there been a case where ALL have been the best that they could be. That's where the craft comes in.

And, craft kicks into overdrive when it comes to song structure and arrangement. Unfortunately, I've heard way too many amateur songs that have a verse/chorus/repeat structure with no variation, no build, no hooks.

If I listen to my earlier songs, the raw materials were there, and my instinct/inspiration quotient was as high or possibly higher than today. But my craft is much better, and so are the songs.

js

Yes, inspiration and craft.

As Benjamin Franklin famously said, "Genius without education is like silver in the mine." Starting with genius and nurturing it with education--or starting with inspiration and massaging it with craft--is like polishing a gem.

Starting with craft alone is like building well-constructed tract housing.

Best,

Geoff

Absolutely. In fact, the author, after finishing his comments on taking control of what you're writing, said "But of course I could also argue the opposite..."

Congratulations! You're better off than some!

Nothing I've written has ever written itself. When writing about a topic that I know very well, the words spew out and I end up with 6,000 words that I have to cut down to 2.500 so it'll fit in the magazine. Doing that is really hard because I've written so many things that I think are important and that everyone should know. I have to think really hard about ho many people will [i[really be as interested or passionate about the subject as I am, and what to those who know nothing really need to know in order to either get a foot in the door or decide that it's a door they don't want to go through.

Then there are the articles that I think need to be written and I have to learn along with with my readers. I need to decide, with little practical experience, just how important each thing I learn is, not just to me, but to the reader. That's pretty hard, too, because I don't want to risk sounding naive, writing extensively about a topic that's well known to anyone with the slightest interest in the overall subject. Call me a tech snob, but I read a lot of articles like that. This is particularly important for writing manuals or application notes because you don't know who you're writing for.

Either way, every writing project needs to be a balance, and sometimes I don't know the weight of the information or the size of the pot (other than a word limit set by the editor).

By the way, happy Grammar Day, everyone.

Q: "Rudy, what did you learn in school?"

A: "I still use the alphabet everyday!"

Yeah, that's the key, isn't it? Re-writing. Of course, those initial sparks can be golden too. We never know. The object is to get out all that "writes itself" stuff. Purge. Put it down. 1st draft. Find the 5% that works as is and use the other 95% to guide us along the rocky road to come, in getting our work up to snuff.

Great topic.

In the classic, The Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joesph Sugarman, sort of the bible for ad copywriters, Sugarman makes the point that we must first be experts on our topic. Even if your job is to put in one sentence how great Axe for Men is.

So in addition to rewriting, there's the whole prep phase as well.

Hardly writing itself.

Sometimes I wonder about some of the people who write marketing materials for music and recording products. I've read some real nonsense in ads, press releases, and brochures. Our own Weasel is pretty good (at least he knows when he should check the tech parts with an expert) but there's some real technobabble out there.

This is a topic that comes up over in the Songwriting Forum frequently... everyone, of course, has a slightly different answer.

For me, inspiration -- however one wants to think of it -- is very important, typically the difference between something that means something to me and something that's just an excuse to bang out some chords and whine out some out of tune warbling. That's not to say that such a song can't, however, touch others. People bring their own context.

For me, inspiration does, indeed, seem to come from someplace outside my conscious mind. (And, since I'm a Berkleyian solipsist, I won't speculate on whence that inspiration springs... since I'm not even sure an outside world exists... I'm not going to speculate on the mechanism behind apparent muses. )

But it does seem that inspiration is like a seed that must fall on fertile, prepared fields... some folks say inspiration is 90% preparation. (Or is it 99%? But you get the idea.) And I find myself in complete agreement with that general principle. When I first started writing songs, as I learned to play music at 20, I had lots of some form of drive to write, and not a little inspiration -- but harnessing that drive and inspiration was not something that came easily. (I'd come up writing 'serious' poetry... trying to learn to rhyme was like going back to second grade.)

Sometimes, with the songs that often become my favorites and which I tend to intellectually think are also my strongest, the songs really do seem to mostly write themselves or to seem to come from someplace distinctly outside or separate from my conscious self. But other times, I'm lucky to get a spark or two, a title or key phrase, maybe just a vague feeling.

I try to capture lightning in the bottle when the inspiration is flowing, sometimes typing as fast as I can.

But when the inspiration is gone, I switch to constructor/editor mode. (Although I try to keep those antennae up, looking for stray whisps of inspiration that might be attracted to the activity of my more conscious, effortful construction and editing. Working with ideas and feelings does seem to 'attract' what I'm calling inspiration.)

And that means conscious, willful effort and thinking... I can really wrestle around with a song -- particularly if there's a lot of connective tissue to fill in around the inspired bits... sometimes a song will have 20% inspiration (that I really like) but require me to brute force the other 80% through will and conscious effort. For me, at that point, I can co-mix writing with editing to some extent (or at least switch modes faster) because I'm not afraid of accidentally blocking the flow of inspiration. (Because it ain't flowing, at that point for the most part.)

Now if someone could help me with bridges...

____________

Mike's comments about ad copy strike a chord with me. Since the time I was a little kid of 12 or 13 first deciding he was an 'audiophile,' I've bee reading marketing speak and shaking my head in wonderment and occasional disgust. It's only gotten worse the more I know.

That said, I've had to write marketing/brochure copy for a tech company and, honest to gosh, unless they give you something, it's hard for a front office type to come up with something compelling that doesn't sound like hooey. You read your competitors ads (my experience was in the communications electronics sector) and they're either filled with over-the-top hooey, specs not tied together by compelling connective tissue, a narrative, if you will... or a girl in a cheezy bikini holding the unit (if it's small enough or standing next to it on a pedestal, if it's not).

This just in on the topic of inspiration and commercial writing...

The National Pork Board is changing their industry's soaring, quarter century old, flight-of-marketing-poetry slogan -- Pork, the Other White Meat -- to something, well, more inspirational, I guess you could say:

"...how do you feel about that colon? The one in the slogan -- not the one the pork is going to be sliding into.)"

Wow. Just... wow.

"...how do you feel about that colon? The one in the slogan -- not the one the pork is going to be sliding into.)" Wow. Just... wow.

I've been inspired by Craig's discourse on the grammatically proper use of the colon (the : kind) a few months ago -- so much so that I've actually tried to break my own habit of using them willy-nilly. (Now if he'd only write on em dashes, ellipses, and parenthetical statements... I'd be set.)

And... of course... I've been particularly inpired by that soaringly lyrical, new pork slogan itself.

I suppose it works better than Pork: Eat a Smart Animal.

Best,

Geoff

Not just smart... but considerably more human-like than many other four-legged mammals, although their more related to whales and hippos.

So far, and yet so near. Last week, an international team of biologists released the first draft sequence of the pig genome, the complete set of genetic instructions for making the ruddy-furred Duroc breed of Sus scrofa. Even on a cursory glance,

I'd disagree with Rothfuss' statement, mostly.

You absolutely MUST let a song or a book take on it's "own life," at least at the beginning. All that's really happening is that putting down the initial ideas on paper or tape are allowing you to have additional ideas you wouldn't have thought of when the whole thing was confined to your mind. It's happening to me, right now, even writing this.

For instance I was going to say that you should regiment a technical document (tops, outline, sentence outline, sections, etc) but just reading back the above paragraph changed my mine as it caused me to think about all the many thousands of technical documents I've written in the last 40 years, which ones were good, and why.

More examples. I recently "broke up" with a dear friend, and I was put into the wonderful / terrible mood of happy / sad. Happy for the time and love we shared, in almost physical pain from the loss. For me, at least, that's the best possible mood for songwriting.

So I wrote a song, intending it to be about losing that friend, and how everything ends so we have to appreciate it while we have it and remember it for what it was, not for how it ended, etc. After I had the first draft I started editing it, choosing better words, examining meter and rhyme, etc. but something happened that kicked my "editor mind" out and put me back in creative mode.

Specifically, I thought, "This sounds like a relationship breaking up, the listener will think I'm talking about that." Then I thought, "They'll also think that she left me because she's not the marrying kind." At first it irritated me that I had inadvertently created that idea, but then I imagined how I might use that cliche to surprise the listener at the end of the song. Then my editor kicked back in to make it to, to carefully give just enough hints to what was coming and to stamp out any contradictions, while maintaining a strongly evocative patch from beginning to end.

I like the song I ended up with, but I would never have thought of that had I "taken control" of the song from the start. It's likely the song will continue to grow and evolve as I share it with my bandmates.

Another example: my groupie story (linked in my sig) that some of you have probably read. 200,000+ views on the thread, not all due to my writing of course. What that was for me, besides catharsis, was an experiment in shutting my editor off for the duration. I resolved to leave my editor off until the whole thing was done, other than typos and the like. My rules were to use the forum software only, no word processor, so that I would be forced to not edit, as everyone would see my work instantly and some would quote portions, locking me in to what the creative part of my mind had done before my editor could ruin it.

Yeah, it's rough. Yeah, it drifts from 1st person to third, switches back and forth between active and passive verbs, doesn't use carefully crafted phrases, etc. It's just a story, hopefully a compelling one, that doesn't rely on clever wordcraft for appeal (e.g. anything you hear an author read on NPR).

I'm not going to edit this post either. My internal editor is screaming that it's rambling and disorganized, it even wants to put headers in bold on the various parts. Not gonna happen!

What I'm saying is what you can read in any number of books on writing or songwriting, which is that it's critical at what point you switch from creating to editing. Too soon, and you ruin the story. Too late, and you have a mess to clean up. For technical documents (which I never hope to write again) it should probably be sooner rather than later. For a song? Well, a song never stops growing. A book stops growing when you publish it.

Those are my thoughts, unedited.

Terry D.

Pork: Not as fatty as you think.

Pork DOES inspire me...to remain vegetarian.

Keep the initial inspiration, keep what you like, hack out what you don't like. Keep shaping it.

I believe it was Harold Budd (who in turn got this saying from someone else) who said something to the effect of, "It's easy to write a song. Just write a song and then cross out all the notes you don't like." Okay, there's a little more to it than that, and it's not always easy, but....I believe the man was on to something.

This is similar to the saying, "It's easy to carve a horse. Just carve out all the parts that don't look like a horse."

I have to say, reading about how smart pigs are doesn't really make me want to chomp them down... I like the researcher who said he'd only eat free range pigs. Coming from the article's description of them acting like humans given the chance, lounging around, snacking, drinking, and watching TV... I can see them out there on that free range... lounging next to a mud hole, next to a cooler full of beer, a Green Acres download playing on the iPad.

It'd be like eating your brother-in-law.

PS @Ken -- and I definitely wouldn't carve a horse... too Equus for this sentimental ol' pet lover.

Sweet geee-zuz! I didn't see that one coming..

I used to work in advertising as a writer, and sometimes it's a bear to be forced to have an idea. Let me give an example, I worked on GM Maritime contracts, Chevrolet and Pontiac in the late 90s. Pontiac was easy, sexy, flashy. Shiny lights. Music with a hook, and we nailed it quick'n easy.

Chevrolet, went for family values for the budget conscious (at least for the entry models). It took forever. Concept after concept got shut down. We almost never had anything out the door and the client was getting *frustrated* (mildly) at us. I pulled out all brochures for all the competition, got a large cup of coffee. After nothing upon nothing, I got frustrated and looked at the content of the brochures and counted up the "standard features" (such as "brakes...") Turned out in the marketing brochures of all the auto manufacturers that season, GM Chevrolet had the most listed. I think it was 35. Toyota had 26 or so, Saturn had another number. But Chev had the most. So a campaign was born and the client loved it.

I ended up leaving that company and moving to another city, and shortly afterwards the campaign went national.

A very inane campaign but it sold, and we weren't lying (honesty is another virtue of advertising, the lawyers make sure of that. Everything has to get passed through a legal department). We honestly did have more published standard features than the competition at that price point.