Writing About Music

What should you do if your project stinks?

Say to it, “Thank you,” chuck it, and then try again.

It’s okay. Probably, objectively speaking, your first few projects in any genre are going to stink. Maybe, they will have an appealing naïve energy, and maybe your newcomer’s exuberance will give it that certain something. But really, master works are created by people with experience. People with experience have generally created a lot of mediocre work in the process of evolving.

So, expect that your first draft of your first book is almost certainly going to stink. It’s hard to write a book. It’s even hard to write a mediocre book. You learn to improve at writing books by doing it and then getting high quality feedback. It would be perfectly natural to work hard for months or even years on a first draft, and then totally scrap it—even reimagining it afterward, chucking out dozens or even hundreds of hours of work, and then creating something totally different instead.

Hooray for you, if your trash can is full! It means you care more about the end result than about hanging onto every precious word or note that you write. You care more about communication than about profit per minute. We arrive at better drafts by taking hard looks at our worse drafts, and then cheerfully moving forward and rewriting.

The first few songs you write will probably really, really suck. Really, they will, even if you like them. Even if your friends say they are awesome. You probably need to write a whole bunch of sucky songs before a good one will show up. So, get them out of the way now, if you haven’t already. Hurry up and write. Maybe, keep your first few songs or poems or book chapters or paintings secret. Acknowledge that they are in service of the better work you’re going to do in the future.

Improvement is a matter of getting your craft together and making technical decisions that will make your works better, rather than holding onto flawed ideas for personal and sentimental reasons. It’s the difference between articulating universal truth, which captivates everyone, and anecdotal truth, which might be what really happened, but which nobody really cares about. You, dear reader, don’t care that, say, my specific pet kitten died. You only care about how I talk about death and loss generally, so that you can relate it to your own life. In art, it is often better to change “kitten” to “goose,” if the technical requirements (e.g., rhyme scheme) of song or poem or story or blog post demand it, rather than to insist on calling it a kitten, just because it was one. The old gray goose just might have to be dead.

(By the way, an “old” goose is technically one that is older than twelve weeks. Before that age, it is called a “green” goose, even if it is gray. But, I digress.)

The first time you write a song, the inspiration for writing might have come from the loss of your kitten, so you’ll want to keep it in. After song number 20 or so, you’ll be more inclined to call it a goose, to suit the melody. Then, you’ll be getting somewhere. So, if you’re still writing your kitten song, acknowledge that it’s part of the learning curve. Only show it to people whose feedback can help you grow. That might not be the random drunks in your neighborhood bar.

Even though it might have involved a lot of work and money, your first album will stink, too. Maybe your third album or book or exhibition will be your first good one. Maybe your eighth. Almost certainly, not your first. For your sake, I hope that your first one is the worst one you ever do. I hope that your current project is worse than all your future projects. If not, you’re probably doing something wrong in your creative journey. Or, maybe you’re just temporarily derailed. Sometimes when you’re learning something new or exploring a new direction, you’ve got to regress and create some stinkers, even if you’ve done good work in the past. It’s the same thing though, in service to your better work to come.

I hope you find this encouraging, not discouraging. I’m currently working on my first CD of songs, and am trying so hard not to make it stink. But I have to assume that it’s going to be the work of a beginning album-maker, and give myself a break. The fear of it stinking has probably kept me from working on it for a few years. That’s bad. I’m now a few years older, but still have the same number of CDs to my credit (i.e., zero). But one of the revelations I’ve had recently is that it’s much more likely that my third album will be my first good one, so I have to get the first two awful ones out of the way first. C’est la guerre.

So, perhaps a good New Year’s resolution would be to get some stinky work out of the way, so that we can get over the hump and get closer to the better work that’s in our futures. If you’re working on a project that stinks and it is almost certainly a lost cause, try to wrap it up and call it done, so that you can start the better one. Maybe you’ve got ten songs recorded and three of them really stink. Just chuck the worst ones, and release the CD with just the seven best songs. Or, maybe the current draft of your book just isn’t right and you can’t put your finger on why. Try throwing away the current draft and redoing it from scratch. Yes, ouch, but do it. It will almost certainly be better in the future. Maybe the stinky draft helped you get your head in the right place to write the version that will actually be useful to someone. Only publish the good one.

Remember, you are not your work. You’re just a person—an evolving human spirit. Your work is something separate, on a hard drive, or in a file cabinet, or in a pile somewhere. It is your footprints, not your feet. Most drafts stink and should never be made public. But stinky drafts are necessary to the process of creating good work, even if the fabulous final product doesn’t much resemble the horrendous early drafts.

Hopefully, after a point, you’ll arrive at something that the rest of us will find a positive addition to the world. We’ll thank you, when you do. On behalf of your audience, let me say what a pleasure it is to read/hear/see something that’s had all the stinkiness removed from it, so that we can enjoy it. We’ve got enough crap to wade through, so as much as you can save us from having to get through more of it, we thank you.

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