Sweet Hubby and I watched "Bohemian Rhapsody" last night, and it got me thinking: I wonder what it actually looks like when someone writes a song. In movies, it's always made to look so easy. Songwriters in films come up with one phrase or a few notes and suddenly have the song in their heads and down on paper. But my experience as a writer is not like that at all. The closest to the real thing I can remember seeing is Jane Fonda pounding away on a broken manual typewriter in "Julia".
I've only written a couple of songs, but they are of the "A-B-A-B-A and so on" variety, with about as much nuance as a Sousa march, clump-clump-clump. What does it take to come up with a song a real song with verses and chorus and bridges, a song that builds in intensity or tells a story, a brand new arrangement of a very limited number of notes and possible tempi?
I know what it takes to write a play, at least the way I write a play. At first it's almost always being caught up in a spark, an excitement, the dazzling promise of a new story or character idea that flows onto the paper in a rush until the heat has cooled. The next day, reading the initial draft can sometimes ignite the same fire. If it's a short play, sometimes two days (for some people two hours) is enough to get down a rough draft. Full lengths take longer, but not much longer when the fever is upon me.
But then comes rewriting, editing, refining, polishing, exploring, trying trying trying. A completely different part of the brain has to come forward and make itself heard. Conscious choices have to be made. Characters have to be forced to do what the story needs them to, not just whatever impulse inspires them to. Delicious lines have to be cut and new lines need to be invented, and they have to have the same flavor, the same passion, the same flow as those first impulses. There are readings, feedback from fellow writers, more rewrites. Writing a play that's as good as I want it to be can take a long, long, long (I really don't want to admit how long for some of them) time. So I do wonder, does it take that long, take that much work and sweat and thought, to write a song? I'll have to ask Stephen Sondheim, should I ever run into him. "So Stephen, how long did it take you to find a way to rhyme 'raisins' with 'liaisons' in a way that would scan correctly?" I do wonder.
I imagine there are those pieces that flow onto the page,"write themselves." I thought that happened to me once, the time I wrote my poem about my mom driving my dad to the doctor's office, where he died right there in the waiting room. But, I had lived that story for more than 40 years, told it, rehearsed it. Pre-writing, first step in the writing process. xoA
ReplyDelete