Try, Try Again
Here’s something about being a musician that’s wildly different from being a writer: as a musician, you’re constantly recreating your art. Every time someone experiences your performance of a musical work, that performance is one-of-a-kind (not counting recording, which is its own topic). Paint does not disappear from the canvas as soon as the artist has applied the final coat of varnish. Words do not vanish from the page when a writer puts the final period on a short story. But when a pianist’s hands lift up from the keys to the final rest of a Beethoven sonata, that artwork doesn’t exist anymore. Want to share it with more people? You have to do the entire thing again—and it’s going to be different, because you’re not a robot.
I’m sure this is at least partly why I gravitate toward writing from a musical background—something about it just seems, well, less exhausting. You don’t have to rebuild all the time. You don’t have to memorize every single word and comma and moment and then repeatedly put it all together again to practice the flow and stamina of a narrative experience. You might change words or move them around, but the words always stay where you put them. In this way, writing is like visual art. If you publish a book, you can effortlessly share that book with people whenever you want to, even fifty years later, without having to put any effort into it.
But writing, of course (how complicated the world is!), is also very much like music. Both are temporal with beginnings and ends, and both are mediums in which an artist guides an audience through an emotional journey or at least through an experience. This feels most true to me in screenwriting, where you write words that literally dictate sounds and sights for a viewer to experience—similar to how it feels to practice for a piano performance. (Prose feels more direct; I think because when prose is done, it’s done. A screenplay isn’t “done” until multiple people have worked with it and produced it and turned it into a completely different medium. In this sense, writing a screenplay and practicing for a piano recital have a stronger sense of “unfinished-ness”—you’re putting work into something that will exist in the future—than writing a short story and sending it into the world as is.)
While writing sometimes feels like a luxury compared to intensive classical piano practice, there is one common refrain that gives me slight chills every time I see it, and that is: writing is rewriting.
Ugh.
“Writing is rewriting” gives off a lot of that “practice makes perfect” energy, doesn’t it? It implies that you have to actually, you know, work and struggle. I just wrote above that I like writing because in writing I don’t “have to rebuild all the time.” But most of the expert writers—both prose and screenwriters—agree this is the real work of it all.
“Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what one is saying.” – John Updike
“Great writers aren’t great first-drafters. They’re great rewriters.” – Taika Waititi
In January, I wrote a short animated script for a web series I’m creating. I was pretty happy with my first draft. To be clear, this draft had already been re-worked and revised a billion times (heyyy perfectionism) so we could technically consider it something beyond a “first draft,” but it was the first draft I felt comfortable sharing with anyone for notes. A lot of those notes matched each other and resonated with me, so I had to face the fact that my first draft was not perfect (ah, this perpetual letdown). More importantly, I was also reminded of the fact that there is no one right way to do something. Some people wanted the script to be more like ABC, and others wanted it to be the very different XYZ. I could see how different ideas about the script were valid and interesting, but also couldn’t all be done together. I wasn’t sure what the “correct” answer was.
I figured it was time to dig deep into “writing is rewriting.” It’s not that I haven’t revised my work before—I’ve moved giant chunks of text around, deleted over 20,000 words from my novel manuscript, rewritten scenes, edited words, etc.—but I’ve never actually done a page-one rewrite. I thought it would be good for me to not look at that first draft for a week or two, then just start over with a new blank page and try to do something better.
Even if it’s not my favorite part of the creative experience, as a pianist I’m well-versed in starting over again and again and again. So, I thought if I applied my experiences from practicing piano to this writing process, it would help make the whole agonizing thing (I mean, why was I doing this to myself? I already liked my first draft!) feel like something more familiar. I broke it down into a few main steps.
Gathering Notes
Some of my favorite moments living in New York were the moments after piano lessons, when I’d take my piano music and my little notebook to a coffee shop and digest whatever had just happened. I’d go through my piano music, line by line, measure by measure, and write down everything I could remember about what my teacher had just said. These were notes about phrasing, meaning, flow and interpretation (all narrative, even if “narrative” wasn’t a word that was used), as well as technical notes on how to practice virtuosic passages, tricky places and fingerings to use. (For reasons that many writers have tried to capture, being in New York City felt somehow integral to the spiritual-artistic validity of this whole experience.)
When I sent the baby first draft of my animated screenplay into the world last month, I gathered notes from writers in my writers’ groups, writer friends over email, and even my non-writer boyfriend who gives some of the best notes. Just as I used to write everything I could remember after those piano lessons, I compiled all of these script notes and wrote them down in one place (granted, I wasn’t able to do this processing with the creative energy of NYC around me, but St. Paul has its own spiritual-artistic gravitas à la F. Scott Fitzgerald).
I quickly realized there was something trickier at play with my script notes: I was the one in charge. As a piano student (“student” being the operative word), I took everything I learned from a master artist-teacher in a piano lesson and worked hard to incorporate it into my interpretation of a piece. There was never a question of whether or not the instructor was “right” about how to practice, for example, a piece by Beethoven. But this is my script. I’m the Beethoven. (That’s a fun sentence, for sure!) And while I do sometimes get notes from mentors and professionals, in this case I had gotten all of my notes from friendly peers (not to say that they are not brilliant people). I had to do more mental work in deciphering which notes I wanted to keep and which ones I was not going to incorporate. I had to spend the most time sitting with notes that made me feel immediately sour and dismissive, because those tended to have pretty good points. I had to, essentially, figure out what I was even doing.
Learn from Examples
It would be pretty crazy to work on a Beethoven sonata (a.k.a., a piece that has been performed widely for a couple of centuries) never having heard it before. In my piano process, I would listen to at least three different recordings of whatever piece I was learning. Ideally and usually, I’d hear more than three performances, but at least three of these listenings would consist of me studiously following along with the musical score and taking careful notes on how other pianists interpreted it.
Trying as a writer to follow along with my piano process, it dawned on me that I had in fact read no animation scripts. Here I was, writing an animated script that I thought was pretty good—without ever having read another animated script. So, I read a few animated scripts. My project was written with kids in mind, so I read scripts like Inside Out, Coco, and Frozen. As with the piano recordings, I took notes. Animated scripts are not written any differently than live action scripts, but I noticed immediately how these scripts flowed with the quickness, punchiness and lyricism that only animation can bring to life. I realized, gratefully, how my script paled in comparison.
Tackle One Section at a Time
Unless you have a piece already solidly learned and a performance coming up, it’s not the greatest use of practicing time (cc: my piano students) to play a piece from beginning to end over and over. After I’d had my piano lesson and written those notes down and let things marinate for a day (the marination phase is my favorite), I’d get back to the piano—or, “the blank page,” if you will—and start to try my best. This part was not usually super fun. I might have mentally understood what I needed to do with the opening phrase of a piece, but it didn’t mean my hands could execute it. I had to try it over and over again, focusing on different aspects of the goal each time—maybe playing the left hand alone, or working on the trills only, or striving to cultivate a super soft ppp sound in one measure through a variety of practice techniques. It took time, and a lot of patience was required. But I’d been diligently practicing piano my whole life, so I was used to it.
For some reason—perhaps because I was working with a short ten-page script, or maybe because I regularly make superhuman goals for myself—I thought I was going to get my draft rewritten in a day. I knew my characters, my story, the necessary beats, and I had all these notes I’d already taken time to vet. In fact, I thought I’d accomplish this quickly on a Tuesday, write about the experience for this post on a Wednesday, and move on with my life. That was a few weeks ago.
I started with an entirely different opening—as many readers had requested—then arrived at the point that matched the previous script (which I was not allowing myself to look at). I paused, unsure what to do next. I could rewrite the scene as I remembered it from the other script, but my goal was to not match the first draft. I looked at the notes I’d compiled—was this an opportunity to use one or more of them? Which one(s)? How? What will the words on this bright blank page eventually be? Will they be decided by fate or by me? Who am I to say that I know how to write this idea? What is this idea? Who am I? I took a good day or two to mull over my script/existence, and then I pushed out the next little section, spent time making it earn its place on the page (this part is where the fun happened), made sure it flowed okay from the previous section, then hit another paralyzing fork in the road. This happened repeatedly throughout the process of writing what finally became my 15-page rewrite, which, while definitely not perfect, is “done.”
My main takeaway: once I accepted the slowness of the process, I was able to relax and have fun playing around with the idea, one little bit at a time.
Do It Differently
One of my piano teachers used to regularly quote the saying that is often (but incorrectly) attributed to Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” My teacher was making the point that playing a passage the same way over and over again is not going to make it any better. If you always stumble over your notes in the same section, playing that section again and again in hopes that it will magically become better is futile. You need to do something differently to change the result.
In my script rewrite, one of the reasons I kept having those moments of paralysis was that I had a strict goal of making it better. I thought it would magically come out better if I just sat and did it (a.k.a., if I pretty much identically followed the process of writing the first draft). It was helpful for me to go back to the thought I had when reviewing notes: there is no one perfect right way to do this. I revised my goal from “do it better” to “do it differently,” and this freed me up to get words on the page. Instead of thinking, “I’m going to write a scene that is 1,000 times better than the original scene I had in this spot,” I’d think about what that original scene was, and challenge myself to write something completely different (provided it was still serving whatever goals I needed it to serve). My process became more about exploring than achieving, and it was exploring that got the pages done.
In Twyla Tharp’s book The Creative Habit, Tharp writes about challenging her lecture audiences to come up with 60 uses for a wooden stool in two minutes. “The most interesting thing I’ve noticed is that there’s a consistent order to the quality of ideas,” she writes. “You’d think the sixtieth idea would be the most lame, but for my purposes, which are to trigger leaps of imagination, it’s often the opposite…The closer they get to the sixtieth idea, the more imaginative they become—because they have been forced to stretch their thinking.”
When I finished my rewrite, it was pretty different from the first draft. I loved a lot of the new things I had written, but I still loved parts of the first draft, too. I wound up reviewing the two drafts side-by-side and re-working the new draft to keep the strong pieces from the first draft. It’s still not a “perfect” draft. It is, even after all this labor, merely a second draft. But I can sense the opportunity here, in this page-one rewrite business. I can sense this is only the beginning of the process, that there are fifty-eight more iterations to tackle before getting to that most-creative sixtieth idea.
This does feel a bit overwhelming, like a giant mountain to climb when I could just, you know, not, but forcing myself through this experience made me think about the real reason I create at all. It’s not really about accomplishing things, it’s about working on things. In the piano world, I’m always trying to explain to my students that they will never master a piece without doing extremely slow, careful practicing of small sections at a time. It’s difficult to accept that the only way to accomplish a creative feat is to stop caring about accomplishment at all, but exploring and spending time together in the present is the only way forward.
Maybe “writing is rewriting” does not have to be such a daunting, frustrating concept. Maybe it could mean, instead: “Hey, why don’t you free yourself up to mess around with this and see what happens?” Maybe it’s more fun and less work and struggle after all. Maybe it’s an invitation to take the pressure off.
To return to the great Twyla Tharp, she writes: “The blank space can be humbling. But I’ve faced it my whole professional life. It’s my job. It’s also my calling. Bottom line: Filling this empty space constitutes my identity.”
I am so pleased to discover that “rewriting” exists for visual artists, too! Check out these fun examples of instances where artists created multiple versions of the same painting.
Here’s more on page-one rewrites in screenwriting, featuring a traumatizing tale of an instructor having students write first drafts and then shredding all of their first drafts in front of them.
On the topic of “do-it-again-but-better,” I give you this classic directing scene from Nathan for You.
Read more Wild Minds posts here.