Over the last few years I’ve listened to more than a few podcast interviews with higher-up creative folks from Pixar, the animation company that’s made the Toy Story movies, Inside Out, Up, The Incredibles, and many others… some of the most artistically and financially successful movies of any kind – not just animated – in film history.

It’s a truly unique company.  One of the things that jumps out at me right away when I hear their top writers and directors talk – they all agree that, as co-founder Ed Catmull says, “Early on, all our movies suck.”

He continues:

“That’s a blunt assessment I know, but I choose that phrasing because saying it in a softer way fails to convey how bad the first versions really are. I’m not trying to be modest or self-effacing. Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them so—to go, as I say, ‘from suck to not-suck’.”

If you follow the history of most creative endeavors, you’ll find the same thing – even if one starts with a good idea, there’s an excellent chance that at some point things just won’t be working.  And that the creator will not know how to make it right.  Catmull adds:

“People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of things—in order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence. But it is also confusing. Where once a movie’s writer/director had perspective, he or she loses it. Where once he or she could see a forest, now there are only trees.”

Sound familiar, fellow songwriters?  Pixar works through these problems with an in-house brain trust of storytellers (writers and directors).  For us, we have songwriter friends, workshops, a producer, band members… and much of the time we’re on our own (sometimes with a writing partner).

But the principle remains the same: Even Pixar movies have to be made good.  And if things aren’t falling into place on schedule, if at some points a song sucks, it does not mean that the writer sucks.  It’s just part of the process.  You get lost… you don’t give up… you can usually find your way.

Most ideas arrive as a fragment, a starting point; they don’t arrive fully formed… that is, good.  They have to be made good.  That’s usually a very incremental process, with occasional (and totally unpredictable) flashes of major insight.

p.s.  This is my 150th Songwriting blogpost!  Thank you for reading.

(Quotes are from ‘Creativity, Inc.’ by Amy Wallace and Edwin Catmull)

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