There was something profound about the manic and dangerous music producer Phil Spector -
He did not believe in edits - ever - the classic songs he recorded -‘ain't no mountain high enough’ the song about Spain - they were all recorded in the moment - they were a single performance caught in time and recorded down on tape - he refused to edit or mix them post-performance - everything was set up perfectly so when recording commenced and finished the song was already finished - this idea is genius in its simplicity - you don't fix things once you’ve done them
You accept
You accept and revel in the beauty and imperfection of what you create and move on - you don’t sit around trying to massage things into greatness - in doing so - you only destroy the original goodness in one's original music, song, writing or piece of art -
Editing your writing is dangerous - sure you may have the original sentence and the edit one and look at and compare them - but you know what - don't do it - your judgement gets skewed - it seems obvious that one will have an implicit bias for the reworked instead of the old - the more time you spend on something - the harder it is to let it go - or realize you wasted time on something that wasn't even broken
It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems but let them go at first sitting, because if I have lied originally there’s no use driving the spikes home, and if I haven’t lied, well hell, there’s nothing to worry about. - Bukowski
Phil Spector did not cry over imperfections he prepared as much as he could then embraced his musical recordings - he would pile 20 musicians into a room - he would have three bass players - 4 percussionists - this is how he got his famous ‘wall of sound’ - can you imagine the fun he had - they all had - making records - when Spector wasn’t pointing his gun at the musicians and audio engineers telling him not to change a thing
I remember recording a song once - years ago - it was my sister and I - it was a modest and simple song - but our recording had a magic to it - like Neil Young says you want to capture the magic - we caught some magic - we came back a week later and our song had been masquerade by post-production - it was heartbreaking - letting things be is a skill - it's a virtue - it pays off in the long-run - constantly tweaking things - can destroy things
I re-read the Great Gatsby recently - the best and most energetic climactic chapter was the most rough - i thought to myself god this could’ve done with some editing - i was wrong - either the chapter had been over-edited - or it had been under edited - or edited least of all the chapters - i now come to think the latter of the three was the case - Fitzgerald messed with it least - it was complicated and challenging to write - he let it be - he did not ruin it - he enjoyed the beauty of the original - it doesn't matter if this even wasn't the case - the important thing to note is that there is something called - raw beauty - and it's fragile
One of the most famous writing guides confirms my suspicions - you don’t want your writing to have ‘clear traces of engine grease on it’ from overworking - better to have no grease on it - just a very thin film of sweat, passion and love
Three extremely famous writers defend this position of avoiding editing - Nietzsche - Bukowski - Kurouac - Nietzsche likened writing to calligraphy - as soon as one’s ideas were down on the page they were dead and dying - the beauty was in having them exist in one’s head and shot onto the page - the aphorism is at the end of beyond good and evil
Bukowski claims writing should explode out of you and onto the page - you can’t do this if you are being overly critical - you lower your inhibitions - you stop judging you let the words come out of you - it's like an act of sex - you don’t critique things after the fact
Kerouac is open and vocal about his writing style ‘you have to let it blow’ you have to search around in your brain for things you want to write about but are scared to write about - you stop worrying about perfection and you can write about anything - you can write a lot - and you can feel a sense of release and emptiness once you have written things down on paper - writing is a form of emptying - that’s why Bukowski said he would pay to write - he said he would pay a $100 dollars an hour I believe or something to that effect - this is because writing is a form of psychotherapy - you have to write your own thoughts down - you have to write about yourself - through writing you reconnect with lost parts of yourself - you reintegrate what was lost but remains invaluable to the whole
Think of Jordan Peterson - i like his style of writing - its beautiful - free fun and clear - and yet he laboured over what he wrote in one book for years - not that i am knocking his process - all I am saying is look at his verbal output and his written output - at least in terms of novels - I'm not including his papers - he has hundreds of hours of lectures - maybe even thousands of hours of lectures online now - and yet he has only written two books - i think this is a good example of over-editing - you can write 10 books or the same book ten times - although it may seem entirely justifiable to make sure many read and experience a single book with a beautiful reading experience - at the same time i think something tremendous is lost - volume, authenticity, humanness - to see someone you admire openly display their shared humanity is a beautiful thing - this is exactly what over editing covers up
Kerouac says read for the first word - a book I read - said the first you reach for is generally poison when you are starting out - but he also states the more sentences you write the better you get at forming sentence - i think this is true - in a sense, I think there are two forms of writing - repressed and unrepressed writing or perhaps suppressed and unsuppressed writing - take your pick - i think what proves enjoyable what leads to volume is to write a lot and write with abundance and freedom -
Chess is helpful to explain this phenomenon - there are two games of chess for example and here I am being a reductionist - no i don't have to be - there are three games of chess - classical that takes say 3 hours - there is medium classic 120 mins - then there is speed chess say 1, 30, 10, 5-minute games - they are all pretty short - but what I am most interested in is bullet chess - 1-minute games - have you ever played a game of chess in one minute - it's exhilarating - you have to be completely in the moment - you have to draw on everything you know - you have to flow - you have to play from your gut - and there are no take backs no mental mind editing of moves - you think and move as one - mind and action become one - the best chess players excel in this style - many say this style of chess - bullet chess - is the key to their success - when you play like the wind - you realize how little time is necessary to play a game - you change - you evolve as a player
Why do i mention all this - because you can write like a chess player plays bullet chess - you can write like lightening and in fact, the moves and sentences you play at lightning speed - are very unusually - you stop tripping over words and sentences - you keep pushing forward better or for worse and it's a way to play and write a lot - and there are many sayings that say to reach the quality you need quantity -
One example that illustrates this point is ‘clockwork orange’ this book was written fast - many famous books have been written fast - the work was brilliant - sometimes brilliance is a paradox - sometimes you don't have to force things to get where you are going - you simply have to do the opposite of what you are doing - stop agonizing over what you are writing and write a lot - see if the fun comes back into the practice - see if the thought of writing doesn’t scare you anymore - it's an idea worth pursuing -
What if you could write years worth of content in a week - if you let yourself flow - and what if every week you improved as a writer - or more importantly as a human being
When I think of writing - I think of Calligraph - great calligraphers - never edited their calligraphy after the fact - they flowed on the lightening edge of the now - they practised for years in this way - those who were great practised over and over again - never edited and had to grow accustomed to the quick-drying speed of ink - sure they practised their own letters and symbols - but they still had to do so fast - you can practice writing sentence structures very fast with variation too - how writers amass such momentous outputs of works - they do so by writing in a different manner - a more human manner - i believe -
Remember the analogy of the chimpanzees locked in a room full of typewriters who if given enough time would type out the collected works of Shakespeares - now realize - there is no great difference between a chimp and a human being.
No comments:
Post a Comment