There’s writing and then there’s (cue ominous music)… Rewriting.

I look at writing as an enjoyable experience.  It’s often fun, entertaining, and it provides a challenge that I find stimulating and exciting.  To me it’s a more interesting way to spend my time that most other things I could be doing.

All that said… Sometimes it is hard to find a song idea worth pursuing.  Once that’s found, fleshing it out can be a challenge – finding the right structure for the idea, a good story or point of view for the lyric; things like that.  Then sometimes just finishing it up – writing that third verse, say, or the bridge – doesn’t come easy.

But once you’ve made it past all that; once the song’s more or less done… that’s when you get to the part that separates the men from the boys, the women from the girls, the cats from the kittens… that’s the part they call Rewriting.

It means being willing to go over it all again, even when you feel like you never even want to hear it again; or even when you feel that what you’ve written is already ‘perfect‘. It means trying to make it better when sometimes you feel like you don’t care – “it’s good enough”… But the thing is, you do.  You do care.  And because you care, you don’t ignore the voice inside that says it can be better.

So you pick it up again, one more time, turn it upside down and shake it by the heels to see if any improvements fall out. And you know what?  Sometimes they do.  Sometimes – often – you can make it better.

You try not to be too attached to what you’ve already written.  You have to be willing to give the boot to anything that doesn’t fit anymore.  And that can be hard – because sometimes that thing that’s got to go is by itself the coolest piece of writing in the song.  But that’s the discipline.

Rewriting is when this thing we do can really feel like ‘work’.  And who gets into songwriting because they like ‘work’?  But I try to be willing to do it because sometimes that last little 2%  of improvement can make all the difference.  And also because something really fantastic, much more than 2%, can happen.

Mainly I think the impulse to rewrite comes from pride in one’s craft.  The feeling that you don’t want to let it out the door until you feel you’ve done everything you can to make it as good as you can.

Of course sometimes deadlines truncate this process, and that can be good – it can mean you’re getting paid!  And sometimes things emerge and just feel ‘right’ pretty quickly.

But mostly, writing, for me anyway, is a process of incremental improvements that if I’m lucky may add up to something special.  It’s writing… and then it’s Rewriting.

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