Writing is active. Moving forward, one note leads to the next, one word follows another. When it’s flowing it’s a beautiful thing, a high. Even when it’s not, I’m coming up with stuff, or attempting to by just messing around with the sounds of music and words. Trying things out, keeping my ears open for happy accidents that might be better than anything I expected..

I often have some sort of starting point but from there the key word is NEW. I’m more or less starting from scratch and, even if the ideas are familiar, I’m combining them in a new way.

Rewriting seems to me to have two parts. One might be more accurately called Editing. As opposed to the original writing, this is more reactive. I’m responding to the original ideas and trying to improve them.

Here I try to tune myself to what the present version of the song needs, what it’s missing, what doesn’t quite make sense or flow naturally.

Being attuned to this very personal reactive ‘vibration’, developing this inner voice of taste and preference, is a skill like any other that can be improved with time and practice. It requires honesty; acknowledging when something doesn’t feel right for the song instead of just saying, ‘it’s good enough’.

Then it’s time to come up with improvements for what falls short… which takes me back to writing again, also known as rewriting.

Finishing? Getting all those nasty details right that can make a good song better and a better song great? That can be work!

One of the truest of truisms about any kind of writing is that it’s always easier to start something new than to finish something that’s not right yet and needs work. I’ve seen this over and over in myself and many other songwriters.

Another hard truth, though, is that most good songs require some cold-eyed rewriting.

To summarize, I’d say the initial writing part is, or should be, more like play – fooling around, trying things out, keeping the stakes and inhibitions low. What have I got to lose?

The two aspects of rewriting are intertwined. The editing part is more focused – reacting to what I’ve already written, trusting the inner voice that says I can cut something or that it can be better (though I don’t yet know how).

The writing part of rewriting is finding the how. It involves bringing back the playfulness… but now the play’s not so free. Now it has a goal, a purpose – to finish this individual song in a way that’s right for it and only it.

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