Why Do You Write the Way You Write?

Lots of writers ask me why I write the way I do. Especially poets. There is an assumption behind the question: that writing is an act of will, or of self-expression, or of conscious activity. I dispute this assumption.

Why do I write the way I do? Because when I listen to the trees, the wind, the waters, the sky, the trees, the dancing fire pit, that's what I hear. I listen. I pay attention, and what I write is what I experience, and is my response to that experience.

I learned that from Matsuo Basho, the haiku master. I also learned that from Pauline Oliveros and John Cage and Morton Feldman, who each in their own way created musical situations in which listening was paramount. Oliveros took this to the point of almost sacred intensity. Interaction with the environment, by listening and responding, is central. Oliveros called it deep listening. Cage called it paying attention to the sounds of the environment. Feldman called it forth by playing his music always very softly.

I feel like the assumption behind the question, why do I write the way I do, is ultimately about ego. It's about wanting to fit a key into a lock and have a pat explanation. I feel like it's about control, in the end. In the days of social media, it's hard not to feel like it's also about narcissism, and self-empowerment, and self-expression, and emotional process work, and placing the individual personality foremost in the field of being.

This unspoken assumption about why writers write, perhaps especially poets, also leads me to be often asked about my writing habits. We have two generations of poetry workshops and MFA writing programs, now, which if you've been paying attention has led to an over-emphasis on craft. Why? Because you can't teach anything but craft; you can't teach heart, the writer has to have that, or develop that, on their own. When people ask me about my writing habits, I am alert to their quick judgments about how my habits differ from their own. According to one poet I knew, I have no discipline, because I write when listening calls me to write, not for an hour or two every morning, like a newspaper opinion editor. I don't write every day. I write when what I hear calls me to write; which takes me back to deep listening.

All of this puts me in a secondary stream to what poetry publishing is now. It puts me in a lineage of meditator-poets, nature-engagin artists, listening composers, writers whose work is based on observation and listening rather than milling their personal biographies for grist. Maybe that's why I rarely get published in the mainstream. There's not enough "I" in my poems, perhaps. I do not claim to be a great poet, or even a good one; but I *know* that some rejections from some quarters are due to the unfashionability of the way I write. Which is another assumption behind the question, that I also dispute.

Well, some of that is indeed about finding your niche, fitting a key into another lock. But some of that is not: it's about making an egoless art, rather than an art that projects personality-ego.

Egoless art is VERY unfashionable lately. Don't kid yourself into thinking that art isn't subject to fashions.

I don't know where my poems fit in; honestly, I haven't been trying very hard to find or create a niche. It is, or it is not. I do feel deeply connected to a lineage of writers, though; not just influences but kindred spirits. I certainly have the same small amount of ambition and ego as any artist, in wanting my work to be heard, seen, read by others. Another favorite poet of listening and response, Odysseas Elytis, once said, "Every poet needs an audience of three, and since every poet has two good friends, the search is for that elusive third." The poetry written the way I write has always had the two, and is always searching for the third. So, there is a stream of this kind of poetry, and there are many who do it. Perhaps they are content to be far outside the mainstream, and just keep listening.

Playing and Making

Music performance and composition:

Lots of us play musical instruments, or sing. I play adequately, and I sing well (albeit not this week, thanks to pneumonia). But I was not a performance major, practicing several hours per day. I was a composition major. My urge has always been to Make, rather than recreate.

I do believe you have to be able to do both. I can read music like a sonofabitch, and I could do so even before I went to music school. I've been musical since I was 4 or 5 years old. I started piano at age 6 or 7, and I started singing in choir and chorus at that age, as well. The Lutheran church in Ann Arbor that my family went to had a music staff who were at the University of Michigan, and we did a lot of ambitious music in church choir: before age 24 I had sung probably a third of all the Bach Cantatas, some more than once. So I have some pretty good performance chops.

But I'll never be as good a Chapman Stick player, or bassist, as several of my friends are. I don't put in the practice time. (I'm not a slacker. In fact, for most of my adult life, I had an undiagnosed chronic illness that sapped my strength and willpower, and which I will spend the rest of my life recovering from.) There was a period in my 30s when I was in several bands that focused on improvised music; so you could say I was composing on a weekly basis, and playing spontaneous music. But most of that went direct to recording, and was never notated. It's only in the past five or six years that I've begun seriously notating written music scores again, and I've been prolific throughout this period. (Within the limitations of chronic illness and post-illness, always.) When I was in my 30s I did not suck as a player, but in fact I'm a better player now, even though I play gigs less often: time and experience do that, no matter what age you begin. I don't have as many opportunities to play, which sucks, but on balance I'm musically satisfied because I'm writing more.

My focus was always on Making. On writing music. On composing. I have been reading a biography of Wayne Shorter, which made a comparison between Shorter's meticulous writing of music and Joe Zawinul's habit of improvising a piece, then transcribing it, and declaring it done. Actually, I do both. Both of those methods work for me. Most of the music I recorded in my 30s and 40s was never notated, but it WAS recorded, and stands as pieces. I did on occasion transcribe music I had recorded and made it into a score others could play. ("Night/Fire" on my album The Western Lands was done this way.) If I had enough energy, or an assistant, I could transcribe most of what I recorded in those years, and give you a score you could play from. (But I don't. If I have any regrets about surviving chronic illness, it's that I never had the energy to do what I wanted to do, and so much never got finished.)

You see, that's been the trade-off: I will never learn to play as many songs as many of my friends do, and I'll never play them as well as they do. (Mostly. I do have my moments.) But most of them don't compose as much I do, either. That's the trade-off I observed way back in music school, where I was majoring as a composer: what your emphasis is, is probably what it will in future. Bruce Cockburn, the great songwriter, once said something that really stuck with me: "I don't know many songs that I didn't write." (He then said, "But this is one of them," and launched into Monty Python's "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." A song, I might add, that I also know, that I didn't write.)

In music school I focused on making new music; all of us music school students who were not performance-track were required to play or sing, and have declared instruments, but even then in my piano and percussion minors I preferred to focus on new music. (Or music so old it was new all over again: hence my minors in Medieval and Renaissance music.) In music school, and after, I was involved with a group of composers and performers who presented concerts of new music several times a year; some of us were both performers and composers, and traded hats as needed. It was a very fertile ground upon which to write and have performed new music scores. It was also the time in which I began to learn to play jazz, and improvise.

Im not sure why I wanted to write about this, today. Maybe it's because I never stop thinking about music, no matter what else is going on. Maybe it's because I see some of my Stick playing pals and other musician pals having all these minor and major successes in their musical lives that make me want to stand up and cheer. And I do cheer! And then, sometimes, I think about how the touring musician life was never one I could take on (undiagnosed chronic illness, for one; opportunities, for another). It makes me very happy to see some of my friends out there on the road, and to get to their concerts as often as I am able (energy permitting: I'd go to a hell of a lot more concerts if I had the strength).

I genuinely enjoy hearing my friends make their music. I love hearing what they do. I'll never play as well as they do, and I'm okay with that.

And then I go home and go back to writing. It's just what I do.

What I'm For, or How To Discover Your Purpose In Life By Failing At Everything Else

When I was young, I wanted to grow up to be a scientist.

I spent several years on that, training in the sciences, especially the earth sciences. I pursued that goal all the way to college level classes in geology and chemistry. What stopped me was math studies. I placed in advanced math till the eighth grade, and then I got stuck. Later in life, my Mom said it was because of the math teacher. She had seen it at the time, but had not been able to change it, or talk to me about it; she thought there were psychological problems in play. I had really liked my math teacher at the time, for example he liked to play Beethoven's Sixth Symphony during class while we worked, but he did somehow derail my confidence in my math studies.

I'm not really sure how that happened. I only remember that after 8th grade math, I felt stupid rather than smart in math studies. I had little confidence in my own ability. When it came to college entry exams, I scored nearly perfectly in Language Arts, and only at 50 percent in Math on the SATs. This was after scoring in the top 1 percent in every test battery taken throughout my school years. I still somehow scored in the top 5 percent overall for college entry exams, and placed out of both English and Foreign Language requirements, by getting top marks in Advanced Placement classes for both. But not for math.

I was a gifted child who didn't want to be one. I was one of those child prodigies. But I was bullied for being smart, for being a teacher's pet, for being different. I wanted nothing more than to fit in, to be liked, to be accepted. Well, that never happened. I continued in the sciences, till college, and loved doing geology in the field, partly because I loved being outdoors, and then I realized something.

I wasn't meant to be a scientist.

Well, I was, and none of that work was wasted, but there was a thing in me that could never be suppressed or ignored or set aside. It just wasn't possible. It was too powerful to ignore. It's too much more of what I was, and supposed to be.

I wanted to be a scientist. But I was supposed to be a Maker.

I was born to make art. I'm a natural creative. It's the thing I do best. (Really. I can barely handle mundane tasks like managing money, by contrast.)

It took me a very long time to accept that I'm supposed to an artist, a composer, a worker, a person who makes things. New things. A MAker

I say this with neither pride nor humility. I am neither egotistical about it, or falsely humble about it. It's just a fact. Making things is what I do best.

It's really the only thing I'm any good at. I've tried a lot of other career paths in life, and mostly failed at them. I'm looking at a future of failure again, every time I try to fit in, or be accepted, or be like other people. Fitting in never worked in school, when I was being bullied, and it still never seems to work in my adult life. I seem to fated to always be "other." Again, that's just data, not ego.

In mid-college I changed majors from science to the arts. I switched from geology to music, and transferred to the Music School. Almost everyone tried to talk me out of it, including the Dean of the Music School. But the fact is, I had been playing music since I was 5 or 6 years old, singing as a boy soprano soloist. I began piano studies at age 7. (That was inevitable, as Mom was a concert pianist and music educator. Both my sister and I studied piano. I think it made us better thinkers overall, as later education studies seem to suggest.) Everyone wanted me to continue in science, get a good job, and continue to be an amateur musician. But I couldn't do it. In fact, I had been composing music, and had even had a few pieces played, since I was a young boy. I had won awards for short story fiction by age 16. I had gotten interested in photography at a young age, and got better with every year. Even when I was out studying geology in the field, all summer long in Wyoming, my very first college class, when I returned home I had already taken so many photos in the mountains that people started to notice them. I was a gifted child, and stood out, even though a lot of the time I just wanted to disappear.

After music school, my first job after graduation was ironically with Mathematical Reviews, a monthly review journal, where I got in on the ground floor of the desktop publishing revolution, and became a computer graphics expert, a digital type designer, and more. Working in corporate graphic design jobs was creative enough to be fulfilling for me, and I did it for many years, but it still wasn't enough. A book design company, one of the best places I ever worked for, allowed me to use their gear to teach myself Photoshop, and become even more of an expert. I also started to win awards for photography and digital art. I worked there till they corporately downsized. The book publishing business collapsed starting in 2000, and has radically changed since then. Nonetheless, I still have all those skills.

And corporate employment just never seems to work. I can never seem to make it work. It's like it's prevented. And then my life changed due to chronic illness. I suspect those corporate doors may be forever closed to me now.

So I've got no choice, now, but to go forward with no hope of success but with my only choice being to be what I am, a Maker. I make stuff. It's all I'm any good at. I don't know if it will be enough to sustain me. I guess it's time to do what I'm good at, and forget about the rest.

It's pretty scary, because I've developed trust issues. Really big ones. I guess the only thing I actually trust anymore is Making, in which I never seem to doubt myself, and in which I always have full self-confidence in my ability and need to make things.

I make art of some kind every day. (Well, some really bad days I can't. But that's a symptom of a dark day. I hate it, but I try to get past it.) Even if everything else falls apart, that's still true. ON good days I make things, on bad days I make things, I just make things. I guess that's how to tell that's what you're for: it's the thing that you never stop doing, even when all the rest has been taken away. So that's what you do. That's what you're for.

And that's all I can do. It's all that's left. Wish me luck.

Writing: On Not Being Able to Fit Into the Boxes

I have difficulty even seeing, much less respecting and obeying, what some writers and editors feel are hard-and-fast lines between poetry, prose, nonfiction, creative writing, and essay. To me those all blend together. The most interesting books I read tend to be like the Japanese ideal of zuihitsu, "following the brush," the great exemplars of which style are Essays In Idleness and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. The American writers who have given us journal-books that move easily between prose, poetry, poetic prose, prose-poetry, and creative nonfiction essay, are who really stay with me. Andrew Schimmel, Gary Snyder, Paul Blackburn's The Journals, which I have only recently discovered, to my great delight.

I love the form of haibun, which is the form Basho's travel journal books are written, with alternating prose and haiku sections, on some pages just a single poem, on other pages a formal haibun which is a prose description of a moment or subject followed by a haiku on the same moment or subject but from yet a different direction. In not irrelevant ways, the haibun is my ideal form for writing.

I see when literary publishers offer open reading periods, during which anyone can submit a manuscript or collection, that they often create fixed categories for acceptance. You have to submit through the Poetry gate, or the Fiction gate, or the Nonfiction gate. But what if your manuscript moves between all of these? What if there is no real distinction, or boundary between them, in your writings? Where do submit them? I often feel a kind of decision paralysis in the face of such categorical requirements, and end up not submitting anything anywhere. Because inevitably I'll place my manuscript in the wrong box, and be automatically rejected.

The fact is, my best writing is All-of-the-above. The writing of mine that I like best, perhaps I should more truthfully say. The stuff that I write that excites me doesn't live within the boxes of Prose or Poetry, but tend to be Prose-AND-Poetry. I readily grant that there are lots of editors who just don't know what to do with that. I'm sure I've caused more than one headache which led to rejection. (There is also the issue that when you read a certain genre, yo bring presuppositions—one hesitates to say prejudices—to one's reading, and things that don't go along the usual trails get rejected not because they're bad but because they are not comprehended.)

Well, I don't want to make editors' jobs harder, and I'm not trying to be difficult, AND it seems to me that the rigid categories between writing genres are in fact a barrier rather than an aide. They are illusory, and often arbitrary, and even occasionally rather dismissive.

Because the one genre I don't really write in, and have no real "feel" for writing in the genre that doesn't like to be called a genre, namely, mainstream literary linear-narrative prose fiction. I have written in that non-genre-genre, an have even been published in it. It is just that it seems like an artificial construct to me, like nothing real at all. Virginia Woolf was right: life is not lived as a neatly-arranged linear prose narrative, as consciousness is both more diffuse and more Brownian (nay, distractible) than the artificial construct of linear narrative pretends it is. And not just Woolf says this, but Albert Einstein, whose spacetime theories strongly imply that everything is always happening all at once, and time itself is a constructed fiction of consciousness that we make up to be able to cope with time.

It's very likely that I will only rarely ever get published. (And thank you ever so much to those sympathetic editors who have been willing to take risks on my behalf!) I just can't seem to stay in the boxes.

words from silence

sickle moon through pines setting
river of stars coursing
from fireplace hearth across skybowl
to moon river on lake

long silences
except from firecrackle and wind treerustle

build a fire
cast its glow across the meadow
stars flicker in grass
moon silvers treetops
fire grows and fades
dim eyes in the hedge
no voices but from hill echoes
there's no home here no home
but sojourner's wayside rest

no words rise
out of darkness starlit blessed
abandon all words
in favor of brush, quill, pen
abandon all desire of words
till words come of their own will
creeping at last to doorsill
to hesitantly knock
bright glints of moon
in their wild wild eyes

•

Poem written while camping in northern Minnesota, September 2015

while the light lasts

fire before me, lighting my way
fire behind me, warming me
waxing moon over my shoulder
misty silver mark on sky
through blackbranch trees
moon river on lake surface
small waves striking shore rocks
behind fierily trees
lightning strobe far to the west
past forest swamps and rivers
candles flicker in chill western breeze
we live to write while the light lasts

•

Written while camping on the shore of Lake Michigan, September 2015

Random Notes on a Writer's Life

Productivity: as usual, I am sporadic. As always those critics who think all composers, writers, and songwriters are (or should be!) daily-disciplined craftsmen who write every day, and who dismiss inspiration and the Muses as beyond the pale, are wrong. I've had that argument too many times for it to be interesting anymore: the "you're not a disciplined writer!" accusation against me, because I'm not a daily-disciplined writer, but one who waits and listens for those inner voices to bring something forward—and yet the critics and writers who would chastise me for being "undisciplined" by their standards still can find nothing wrong with what I write, it's not inferior to their own work, I produce enough work to satisfy demand, and despite grumbling they often accept it for publication. My discipline is to always be ready to write it down, whenever it comes forward to be written down. I find nothing kills freshness like stale rote "discipline." It's true that daily writing practice can help you polish your art, and improve your craft—but if you have nothing to say, so what? It's just hollow words.

•

So, as usual, I'm sporadic. Yet, in the past week or so, I've gotten down three poems, two of which are probably more in the song lyric column, all of which will be worked on more, later. I've also had some musical ideas floating around. In the next few months, I need to write another larger choral commissioned work, and I'm putting out tendrils to gather in ideas, inspirations, and texts.

•

Last night I rolled into the computer a cassette of a Barbaric Yawps live show, recorded in July 1996 at the Madison Art Fair on the Square. I was listening in particular to my own solos on Chapman Stick for those world-music-inspired progressive/free jazz band pieces that we worlked hard to perfect; the Yawps always played on the fractal edge where form and chaos touch, always intentional but near the edge of flying off in any direction. There was a power and life-force aspect to playing with the Yawps that was one of my favorite things about the band. We opened this Art Fair set with one of my own pieces written for the Yawps, "Nomads," which is written in a post-Ellington complex (world music inspired) scale, with polychords; I can readily admit that "Nomads" was my response to "Caravan," just pushed further and a bit more off-kilter and polytonal. (I wrote a few tunes for the Yawps, but most of the music was created by reeds player Tom Lachmund.)

Last weekend I was at Interlochen, in Michigan, for the biannual Interlochen Stick Workshop, my second time attending. I want to do more Stick workshops. I need to reconnect with the music and musicians, and begin doing regular gigs again. This is way of both improving my own playing skills, and networking; both are beneficial. The social aspect of the Stick seminar was actually as powerful for me as the actual classroom work.

Hearing the Yawps recording from 1996, I hear myself playing chordally-complex jazz solos that I can still hear in my head, but haven't played lately. I can hear my conceptual zone in play there, and I had finger dexterity I lack, now. I know I lost ground when I was really sick, a few years ago, and didn't have the strength to do much playing. Now, I want to turn that around. I'm getting my strength back, slowly, and want to get my playing skills back. I like what I heard during this 19 year old performance: recorded before I was really sick, and before I moved out West, and things got chaotic and my (as yet undiagnosed) illness worsened, and robbed me of life-force. I no longer had the strength to practice regularly, and even though I was gigging when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, it wasn't regular, and it was more on the avant-garde and free-jazz range of music-making, which doesn't require me to deepen my performance technique, in some ways. Being at a seminar that forced me at times to back up and re-learn some basic techniques and ideas was refreshing, stimulating, inspiring, and enlivening. Give me more!

•

Downside of being a lifelong science fiction, mystery, and fiction reader: I often spot the plot twists well in advance. It's partly because linear narrative has s logic to it, and it's partly because, as a storyteller oneself you know how stories are constructed. Even more than that, as a student of myth and folklore, and of the archetypes, you look for and find patterns in how stories are constructed. It's no secret that Joseph Campbell, the mythologist and anthropologist, was a student of Carl Jung, the depth psychologist who proposed the idea of archetypes of the collective unconscious; and it's no secret that I am a student of both these teachers.

Still, when I encounter a storyteller who can really surprise me, or whose work is a fresh take on the oldest myths, I treasure being surprised. That itself is one big reason I still read SF.

(And for the record, nobody uses "sci fi" to describe the genre except outsiders and popular media junkies.)

•

Meanwhile, I had a real, genuine, short story published this year, in JONATHAN magazine. An actual short story! An actual, for that matter, science fiction short story! It was titled "Shimmer," and is in the May 2015 issue. So I guess I can legitimately call myself a fiction writer now, a storyteller.

And I have had a scattering of short-short stories accepted for next year, as well.

I have also had a number of poems accepted for publication later this year.

I don't submit a lot, and I admit I'm sporadic about writing. Sometimes I do my best work under deadline pressure, and when I am asked to write something. It gives me a kick in the pants to get it done.

And my art installation at Silverwood County Park, The Temple of Deep Time, has been extended for a year. And I am being asked to submit proposals for new installations, for other settings and occasions. So I am being asked, and I am working to meet those deadlines.

This also reflects my increasing ability to actually Do The Work. The return of life-force and strength makes me able to meet these requests and goals. For now, it's very helpful for me to have an external push; at some point, the external push will be less necessary, but always welcome. I am still getting used to the idea that, for most of my adult life, I was not actually lazy and unmotivated, I was sick. I was sick! Sick with an illness that robbed me of strength, of life-force, of motivation, of mental health, and much more. I am too old now to probably ever fully recover; and yet here I am, able to do more now than I could imagine a few short years ago, and with the desire to do it all. I will never have "normal health" for someone my age—but I can do more than I have been able to in a decade. I am aware, today, that when I am not feeling PTSD or crushed down by life, I feel so energized I can barely keep myself in my body. And I am aware of how much I want to get done in whatever remaining years I have left.

•

It needs to be said, again, though: I don't make art for purposes of "self-expression," that hoary Romantic myth. Sometimes I do, but mostly when I make art I feel egoless rather than ego-empowered. There are things I have to say, and want to say, but a significant percentage of what I Make just has to be made, and I don't feel like I'm in charge, or "controlling" that, or the master of it. It just happens. Often I don't know what's going on anymore than you do—until afterwards. Craft is great for analysis, and theory is great for figuring out what you just did. It's not a very good prescriptive master, though, but more of a tyrant when applied beforehand rather than afterwards.

Why I'm Not Writing Poems At the Moment

Well, it's complicated.

Of course, that's what one always says. But there is truth to it. I am at the moment going through an exhausting process of getting rid of most of my belongings, preparing to sell my house and move, probably even be homeless for a month or two, and going on from there. It's a big change, and often quite overwhelming. It is so enveloping a situation that I find myself not making much art right now—which is an aberration in itself—and in particular not doing much writing.

This is one of those things that I will write about when it's all over. When, during the course of the summer, I will probably be living in a tent, traveling for a bit, spending some time absorbing and processing what has been happening, and what has happened, and thinking about What Next. I often do much of my my best thinking and writing while traveling. I often write longhand when on the road, poems, essays, journal rants, even the occasional short story. I expect that to happen, this summer, once the dust settles. I really miss not having been able to travel much in the past year or so. Cabin fever has been a constant problem. I didn't get to do a road trip out West in the past 20 months, and I can feel both the spiritual and psychological pressure, and the physical restlessness, that are a result.

Not making art is not good for me. I've been under too much stress and anxiety. So, sometimes I just have to shout. Sometimes you just have to. I have been making some art, in between, but the stress and physical exhaustion of all that must get done has often left me with no energy after a long day or night, and I just collapse. It's not good for me to not make art. It can be worrisome if I'm not getting that done.

And the truth is, I have been in a music-making and visual art mode for several months, writing only scraps of poetry, and shorter personal essays, rather than longer poems and so on. I have been composing a lot of music in the past few years, and that is so very satisfying that it sometimes makes the rest of the art-making go away. Music is still my centre, my core, my deepest source and root. Poetry has never been the primary art form for me—which has been known to piss off other poets, who think it ought to be, or like my poems well enough that they want more. Well, most of them have other jobs, too: so they have no pressure on their writing beyond what they put into it. I am required to use my creativity for whatever trickle of income it generates. So I wrote a short poem when I am moved to: not when folks want me to. It's a matter of focus.

But also of crop rotation. Right now, I'm just not in poetry mode. I expect that will come around again. Honestly, I write a lot of poems, and good or better poems, when I'm not feeling so musically satisfied. The visual art is on its own parallel track, because these days it just goes on no matter what, since even my cellphone has an excellent camera on it. I can always make photos.

Recently I spent some time in the Art Institute of Chicago, looking at artwork. It's always inspiring to visit a museum full of paintings and other art. You get ideas. You absorb the vibe. You think about how other artists lived and worked. You feel validated in even some of your craziest. It's always a good day when it's spent in an art museum.

And so, why I'm not writing poems at the moment doesn't really matter. It will shift back in that direction when I'm on the road again, I have no doubt of it. I hope to write a few more songs soon, as I am finally ready to gather enough songs to record a solo album of songwriting. There will be other singers than myself, I hope; singers with better voices, albeit under my producer's direction. I hope to get to that once I'm past this big change in life. Stay tuned.

For the moment, this is just a ramble out loud down the thinking lane towards the garden of forking paths. Who knows what's around the nest turn? I never have known what art I'm going to make next. I just do it, and see what happens. And we go on.

Novels Are Not Non-Linear Enough

(This rumination was inspired by an essay by Jim Murdoch on how long it should take to write a novel.)

I love reading novels, although I think the ideal length for a novel is the novella, and most of what we get these days is pretty bloated. I read and re-read certain authors on a regular basis, and many of these are authors of novels. I'm pretty much always reading at least one or two novels at any given time. I read faster than most people, I have discovered, so I can read a lot more than many people do. I read broadly, with no loyalty to any genre of novel-length fiction except that which excites, illuminates, stimulates, and surprises.

I'm drawn to Virginia Woolf's least "narrative" novels, such as "The Waves," but also to "To the Lighthouse," one of the greatest novels ever written about the tension between the artist's temperament and the non-artist's inability to comprehend that temperament. I've read all of James Joyce, and most of Samuel Beckett. I've read all of E.M. Forster multiple times. I watch Doctor Who. I read theoretical physics, for fun, and because I'm interested in it and can understand the concepts if not all of the math. Richard Feynman is not over my head, but that's mostly because he was such a gifted teacher and thinker. I've read many of Michael Moorcock's books, including his literary criticism essays. I've read pretty much all of Nikos Kazantzakis, fiction and non-fiction alike, drawn to it because of his courageous encounters with the unknown mysteries that some call mysticism and others call existentialism. I read Peter Matthiessen's novels as well as his creative nonfiction, since he is a master of both. I read all of Jim Harrison's books, finding a voice therein that I feel kinship to out of similar experience and background, who is also different enough that I am stimulated with new ideas and directions of thought.

I read a lot of novels. Yet I don't read many bestsellers, as I find them very predictable. I don't many thrillers, which is what we call adrenaline-inducing suspense fiction written in the very plain "no-style style" of naturalistic narrative nowadays. And I don't read much "literary fiction," the genre of "naturalistic" fiction set in the present day, usually set in The Big City, that defines itself as being the only genre of narrative fiction that is not in fact a "genre" (as opposed to those categories booksellers use to help you find the books easier on their shelves: mystery; science fiction; self-help; etc.). In most thrillers and many mystery novels I usually figure out Whodunit well before it's revealed to the reader; the only time I don't know in advance of the reveal is when the perpetrator is deliberately concealed behind a screen of distractions, as I find most Agatha Christie type of mystery novels to do. I find John D. McDonald's and Raymond Chandler's mystery novels to be far more compelling, because they are character-driven rather than puzzle-driven, wherein sometimes their plots aren't very linear, their heroes and villains neither one-dimensional nor easily predictable. In most mainstream literary fiction, I am drawn to the outliers (Matthiessen, Kazantzakis, etc.) almost because they are considered outliers, a little bit odd, not quite in the mainstream. I was originally drawn to the Beats for the combined reasons that they were literary outlaws, and because several of them were openly practicing homosexuals. We find our (literary) role models where we can.

I do like to read stylistically experimental fiction (William S. Burroughs, Samuel R. Delany, Richard Brautigan, etc.), and metafiction (Jorge Luis Borges, etc.), but not because it's obscure and difficult—indeed, if I find it to be obscure mostly for the sake of being obscure, a kind of stylistc mannerism rather than form dictated by content, I throw it away—but because experimental fiction uses language poetically, in ways that shapeshift your mind into different ways of perceiving and experiencing reality. (Which is something that science fiction written from an alien species' viewpoint does too, at its best.) I like to experience thinking from inside the alien mind, even if that alien is a human from a different culture, or from a radically different psychology. I like to be surprised, and to experience new ways of thinking, of being.

So I read a lot of speculative fiction—which is usually called science fiction, or fantasy—because it puts your inside a completely different way of thinking about life better than any other literary genre. Speculative fiction is by definition a literature of ideas. Speculative fiction at its best gets my emotions engaged, because it is still telling a human story, even those told at a distance of centuries in the future, which actually is no more alien a territory than the profoundly human stories given us by Shakespeare centuries in the past. I've heard some critics argue convincingly that some of Shakespeare actually could be called science fiction, for the same reasons that Mary Shellley's "Frankenstein" is considered by many to be the first modern science fiction novel: fabulist tales told of incredible and amazing adventures in places not quite real, either in time or space, in which human beings act out the archetypes of story which such gripping writing that we are captivated and find ourselves mirrored in those distant and strange lives. Speculative fiction engages my intellect and sense of wonder, as well, because it is the literature of ideas. Sometimes it can be literally "wow!" mind-blowing, and you finish a novel that makes you think about things in ways you never had before. It can literally "change your mind," if you're receptive and open to that.

I read a lot of "regional" fiction, stories in specific times and places, stories written by writers strongly associated with particular places on the North American continent that happen to be neither New York City nor Los Angeles, the self-involved centrifugal linear accelerators of anointed Literary Establishment mainstream linear narrative novel writing. I like to read stories in places I know well, places I have lived in, places I love; places like San Francisco (which is always a character in any movie filmed there), Wyoming, New Mexico, Chicago, Ann Arbor, the Great Lakes region including Michigan's Upper Peninsula and Wisconsin. Fiction set in places where you nod your head in recognition of both name-checked street names and locations, and the habits and customs of the local inhabitants. Of course, by this criterion New York City fiction is very much a regional fiction sub-genre (albeit often a very provincial one), and so is fiction set in Los Angeles. One of the things that draws me to "regional fiction" is, again, that it is marginal, not in the mainstream of the East Coast Literary Establishment. I have lived a significant portion of my life in the "flyover zone" between New York and Los Angeles, and I find that writers living and writing from within the heartlands of the continent often have much more to say to me than do writers of the New England or Southern California literary circles.

I also read a lot of shorter fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. I probably read (and write) more essay and poetry than anything else.

So I read a lot of novels.

But of all literary forms, the one I am least, LEAST interested in writing is a novel.

Some of that is because I'm not patient enough to want to write something that might years to complete. It's not that I don't work at making art, and work hard at it, and give my complete concentration and dedication to everything I write. It's that I like seeing a project completed, and another one begun. As a writer, the creative process is what engages me, more than does the artistic product.

And there is also the issue of my fundamental mindset: I simply don't think in terms of narrative. I am science-trained and can think very logically and sequentially, but perhaps that's the problem: a carefully constructed linear plot doesn't engage me very deeply because it's too easy to skip ahead logically and figure it out in advance. I don't even think in terms of linear time (between theoretical physics, a lot of reading in mysticism, and Doctor Who, my experience of time hasn't been linear in a very long time), so making a story conform to the norms of a linear narrative simply does not work for me. I liked how Richard Brautigan used to break up narrative into small vignettes, not always strung together in linear sequence. I like Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness in books such as "Big Sur" and "The Dharma Bums," which is more like Virginia Woolf than anything on the New York Times bestseller lists. As a writer, I have no natural "feel" for plot, narrative, or even linear time.

I am not really a storyteller. Well, I am, because every teller of stories is a storyteller, but I'm not a "storyteller" in any conventional meaning of the term. Thomas Merton was a storyteller, so was Kazantzakis, but their stories were told in ways that no one invested in linear narrative fiction would ever really like. The kinds of stories I most like to tell, or to hear, loop around and around themselves, explore ideas from multiple directions, and step "outside" the linear narrative to look at it from a different angle. (Samuel R. Delany's "Empire Star" is a science fiction space opera that does this unlike almost any other, expanding the narrative viewpoint from straightforward linear narration to multiply-layered causal time-loops that drive the original story by making it happen after it had happened.) So when I act as a storyteller, I almost always get bad feedback from people who want easy, linear, narrative stories—I suspect because on one level they're comforting and affirming, a hedge against the chaos of life that gives comfort by giving chaos structure and order and narrative.

Yet Virginia Woolf said, and experience has brought me to emphatically agree: “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end." E.M. Forster in most of his fiction has some sense of unexplainable mystery, a break in the ordinary plot of everyday life, which often cannot be explained but which always has a profound effect on the people involved, from his "The Story of a Panic" culminating in "A Passage to India." Beckett, well, Beckett is actually very funny, people miss that about his writing; but it's gallows humor, hospital humor, the humor of those who have survived the unthinkable void at the center of destroyed lives and need to laugh because it's better than crying. Joyce experimented with stream of consciousness, but in a different direction than Woolf; some say he went too far into the terrain of the unreadable, and some have tried to come up with pat explanations for why he might ventured off the edge as they perceive it.

I am having some short stories published early nest year in a literary journal. But really they're prose-poems, and pretty nonlinear. That's how I think, that's how I write. Not in any normative traditional linear narrative style.

But I'm an artist. I'm heavily trained in science, and I know how to think like a scientist, and think logically and sequentially, but I am an artist.

Art is not engineering.

Engineering can be creative. My favorite uncle was an engineer, an inventor, a builder; I helped him build a deck on his house one summer, which he designed himself, and the deck is still there forty years later. He had a very creative attitude towards all aspects of life, which manifested as a problem-solving approach to many things, and which worked.

I see a problem when artists start to think that what they are doing is problem-solving first and foremost. (I see this a LOT among designers and graphic artists, who are also very creative people but whose work tends to consist of more problem-solving than inspiration.)

One of the reasons I don't read many mainstream literary fiction novels is that I find them depressingly predictable, especially the ones oriented more towards plot than character. I find many substitute style for actually having something worth saying. I've read Don DeLillo, I've read John Updike, Saul Bellow, and many other darlings of the East Coast (meaning New York) Literary Establishment.

So I'll probably never write a novel. It's just not a form that works for me as a writer.

Well, actually, I might. I have it in me to write a science fiction novel, maybe two. I've had the basic idea and plot in my head for years, and someday I might write it. I've started writing it two or three times over the years, only to leave it unfinished due to other things becoming more urgent and important.

Novels are generally not non-linear enough for me. The novelistic fiction that I am most drawn to breaks those "rules" of "naturalistic" narrative rather than affirms them. Like certain theoretical physicists and mystics, I view that entire form of linear progressive narrative to itself be a fiction. Or as Doctor Who once said: "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but ACTUALLY from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey . . . stuff." Yeah. Exactly.

Writing: Gathering Stems and Branches

There's a writing project I want to start in on. I spent the first part of the morning going through and marking entries in my handwritten journal going back around six years. Marking things I'd written out, but never turned into anything. Some of those pages can be the partial seed of what I want to write now. Formally, zuihitsu, a compilation of things written following the brush. "Twenty-Four Views of Mt. Fuji by Hokusai." Modular. Fragmentary. Linked by mood, topic, tone. Memory books. Pillow Books.

Went into my library to pull out and re-read, or at least skim, some touchstones for what I want to do. Saikaku. The Great Mirror of Male Love. Kenko. Essays In Idleness. Other more modern examples of the form, which after all is an infinitely malleable form. Basho. Oku no hosomichi.

Writing this project will be partially rewriting bits and pieces scattered here and there, bringing them together, making a larger work out of them. Maybe chapbook sized. I'm a good prose writer, although I don't have much ear for fiction. Creative nonfiction is also storytelling, though. I can invent and write if I allow myself to fiction as storytelling, and not wedded to that boring No-Style Style that dominates so much fiction nowadays, the so-called "plain" style.

In reading a literary biography of Roger Zelazny, which I acquired recently, I realize how much he influenced me as a writer of prose. As the book points out, spending a whole chapter on the topic, Zelazny's prose style was always poetic, laced with poetry, frequently requiring a bit of work to get into, but one it revealed itself, sublime. His short "experimental" novel Creatures of Light and Darkness is astounding. It should be taught alongside Wallace Stevens.

That's the only kind of prose fiction I can see myself actually writing: prose fiction that doesn't read like prose fiction. And his short stories, always poetic and sometimes heartbreakingly powerful. Poetic prose that is often oblique, rarely plain.

After reading through old journals this morning, I wrote some notes for what I want to do. Not an outline, never that, just the rule-set for this particular game. Once you write the melody, you improvise around it. Writing prose, for me, to be interesting at all has to be more like jazz, knowing sort of where I'm going but it's 32 bars ahead so take your time and explore the path meanwhile.

This writing project does fall in the category of being prompted, which I know is how I work best. I do well when someone asks me for a piece. Otherwise, I can be lazy, and never get around to it. I love having a deadline, and a goal, and a completion date. I actually work well under deadline pressure.

I also work well when I'm not trying to do anything. When I'm out on a roadtrip, for example, where on those long drives across the land, I do some of my best thinking, and write in my handwritten journal at night, and sometimes in the morning, about whatever I'm experiencing, or thinking about. That's how the elements of the longer haibun sequences of Basin and Range were written, compiled later at home. I scatter a lot of short bits off the back of the wagon, when I roam, and sometimes they add up later.

I'm still gathering. After weeks of thinking about it, at least there's a goal. Awareness of approaching deadlines is my goad. Meanwhile, just keep gathering these loose stems and branches, to build them, and fire them. Ashes and raku to emerge.

Songwriting: Happy to be under the influence

Little fits of snow a-fallin'
and I'm tired and cold and ready for spring
Bigger changes are a-comin'
and it's time to let them come on and sing . . .

I'm ready for spring. I'm tired of shivering all the damn time. To speed things up, I gave myself a Southwestern moment for midday meal and made gluten-free (brown rice tortilla) chicken and three-cheese quesadillas. Something I haven't made since I went mostly low-carb, so about a year ago now. Very satisfying.

And as I ate I sat there reading a long article about songwriter Kris Kristofferson. Lots of younger folks only know him as an actor, but it Nashville he's revered as the songwriter who had an impact on how to write country songs the way Dylan did on other kinds of music. Yes, that important. Didn't know that, did you? Kristofferson changed everything, starting with what you could write ABOUT in a country, making things a lot more honest and realistic than they had been at the time.

I put Kristofferson's songs up there with any of the best of the twentieth century. Some of them you already know, although you might not know it because some of them were hits by other singers first. Kris was good friends with Johnny Cash, who had more than one hit from a song written by Kristofferson. So did Janis Joplin.

I will champion Kristofferson as a songwriter forever. I have learned a great deal about writing songs from him. See, he always wanted to be a writer first, which is why he went out and lived a lot of different kinds of life, in order to feed his writing. Back before MFA programs, that's how you became a writer: The Jack London School of Doing a Lot of Jobs and Gathering Experience. It allows you to write with conviction, honesty, and experience. It's still a better way to learn to become a writer than going to school. School has its value, don't get me wrong, including going to school for writing, but it can also be pretty inbred.

So today I think I'll listen to Kristofferson songs, and things like that. And then I think I'll sit down and write something. Maybe a new song. If there's an influence there, it's one I would be proud to acknowledge.

Painting

Although I am, if I do say so myself, an experienced and even award-winning visual artist, I have never thought of myself as a painter. I did paint with acrylics in my youth, as well as do drawings with technical pens. I always preferred acrylics to oils because they are less toxic, and I also their overlap in technique with watercolors. I enjoyed painting, but it was purely an amateur hobby pursuit.

Last year I rediscovered a cache of some of those old paintings, and was interested to notice that some of the same themes I still pursue in my visual art were already fully-formed: transformation, shamanic and archetypal themes, cosmic imagery, mountains and moons. It is always interesting to learn that some of the themes that you thought you'd grown into along the way were in fact there from the very beginning.

I still don't think of myself as a painter, and probably never will.

Nonetheless most of the art I've made over the past month or so has been: painting.


Kandinsky's Poem, 2012
Collage, papier-maché, altered books, acryclic painting, brush calligraphy, photography, on watercolor paper, 30"x40"

This is a piece I made to donate to a fundraiser being done by the local public library to support literacy education in the community. Literacy was something both of my late parents felt strongly about—our family when I was growing up was a family of avid readers who were not averse to pulling out the dictionary or encyclopedia even while at the dinner table to answer a question—and both of them volunteered to teach literacy at the local public library. So, for me, when I was given the chance to donate art for a literacy fundraiser, it was a chance to connect to my parents, and also to a cause I myself support.

I made this piece to be donated. But as I worked out what I wanted to do, I realized I wanted to start with an acrylic underpainting. Bright colors, that would show through the papier-maché layer, which consisted of prints of my own photos and pages from an old two-volume dictionary. I highlighted the key words on the pages torn from the dictionary using Japanese brush calligraphy materials.

The altered books aspect of this collaged piece was in fact the central aspect, and the origin of the project. The call for donations from local artists, for the library fundraiser, was specifically about altered books. This is a form of art-making using recycled materials that I've been interested in for a few years, but never worked in before. An altered book is essentially an artwork made from an existing bound book, or its pages, or form, or materials. The creative possibilities are endless. I remember seeing examples of books a few years ago from the Berkeley Public Library, books that had been vandalized or damaged, and were given to local artists to make into altered books. In other words, to be given new life. That was spirit of this local library literacy fundraiser, and books were provided by the library, but you could also use your own. I used this old two-volume dictionary that I found at the local thrift store for almost no money at all. And no doubt will make more art from these volumes, as well as some others I have set aside to work with.



After finishing this large collaged piece, I continued to feel an urge to paint with acrylics. So I went and got a few more large sheets of fine printmaking paper, and have been painting. I am almost done with one more large painting, which is purely a painting. I've been working with large swatches of paint, teaching myself both saturated color and dry-brush techniques. I've been reading books about acrylic painting in the public library, and making notes. I've been thinking about putting more art on the wall over my bed in my bedroom; and what better thing to put up there than something I made. I don't care if anyone thinks it's narcissistic, but most of the time I'd rather make art to put up than buy it. I don't call myself a painter, but I am an artist.



As I've been working on this large painting, I've been making photographs of it as I proceed. Both to document the process, so I can retain what I've learned by doing, but also because I had the idea to make detail photographs (detail, meaning close-ups of sections of the artwork) for the purposes of stock photography. Such abstracted forms could be used in future for stock backgrounds, as elements of illustrations, and more. I have worked on this large painting over two or three sessions so far, and have one or two more sessions to go before I reach the point that I have envisioned in my mind.

One reason I referenced painter Wassily Kandinsky in the collages piece I donated to the fundraiser was that Kandinsky, as well as being one of the founders of Modernist abstract painting, wrote extensively about his theories of emotion in painting, about how he wished to reduce representation in painting to pure emotive form, to tell a story in an abstract way. I've written here before about abstract realism in photography; now I approach the topic from the direction of painting, as influenced by Kandinsky.

What I am intending to do with this artwork I am making, despite refusing to label myself as a painter, is brushwork that evokes emotion.

Brushwork can refer to calligraphy as well as painting, writing as well as representational art. Indeed, in Chinese and Japanese art history, brushwork refers to all of the above; because writing in those cultures is ideogrammatic rather than alphabetic, and done with a brush and ink, there are even literary forms that reference the brush in their definitions. So, for me, brushwork includes more than painting.

I am interested in Kandinsky's ideas about how abstraction can still evoke emotion. Almost in the same way music does, not through specific image but through form and mood and color and rhythm. Abstraction that evokes feeling. Which of course is what the American abstract expressionists were pursuing in the middle of the 20th Century. But they were painters, and I'm not.



So, since I work in multiple media, it's only natural that I would import my paintings into the digital realm and work with them there as well. I've been experimenting combining text and illustration, for example.


Storm Coming Near, 2012

I go back and forth between digital and actual painting in this work, which to me seems entirely natural. Paintings will become elements of digital illustrations, be used in stock photos, and will influence art made directly in the digital realm.

One of the most interesting parts of this ongoing exploration has involved painting on photographs, both actual and digital.



What I am exploring now is painting digitally on my tablet computer, my iPad. I am using several apps to paint digitally on the tablet, both in terms of making original illustrations and calligraphic pieces, and also in terms of painting on photographs.


Taos Home

I am particularly enjoying making paintings from some of my best photographs of the Southwestern United States, photos made on recent roadtrips. This is a process of using the photograph as a reference for making an original painting.


Vermillion Cliffs, NM, 2012

Sometimes I start by painting-over a photograph using digital painting software. I can sample and replace the colors in the original image, or I can go wild. I can make the forms and elements of the piece realistic in one area, and completely abstract in another. I find myself usually preferring to veer towards abstract realism.

I have no real desire to learn how to paint or draw photo-realistically, but that is what most instructional books emphasize. If I want a photo-realistic image, I make a photograph, because I am a professional photographer. I have those tools and those skills. I am much more interested, in drawing and painting, in loose realism, or abstract realism.

As with photography, I often begin with a landscape, a place and a time, a mood, an evocative moment. In making a photo, I often wait a long time for the light to be perfect, before I release the camera shutter. Photography can be an art that teaches you extreme patience. You learn to look at your subject a very long time, to see it, before you make your image. These are often the kinds of images I choose to make into painted versions.


Moonrise, 2012

Shapes and forms. Elements of color. Mood and feeling. Abstract realism. Emotion and music and lighting and those times when art takes you out of your mind and into your larger self.

That's what I am seeking as someone who has been painting lately. I am not a painter, and don't want to get stuck in that definition, which limits and skews as often as it liberates. I'm aware of art history, but I'm not dwelling on it. I'm just making some paintings.

This trend is continuing and growing. I am also making little illustrated visual haiku, calligraphic illustrations, sketches and drawings and little scraps of ideas. I'll write more about that later.

Songwriting: Polishing and Revision

I woke this morning with the urge to write. I wasn't feeling very verbal, though; having spent time late last night laying down tracks in the recording studio, that's not a big surprise; I've known for a long time that when the music is flowing, the poetry tends to be quiescent. Still, I felt like writing. So I pulled out my song lyrics workbook and my journal and poetry sketchbooks, and worked on revising some sketches into a coherent song lyric.

That's the process that works for me: write it down while the images and words are coming. Revise later. I know some poets and other writers who revise as they write, but that has never worked for me. In fact, it can even block the flow, and make what comes out all too cerebral. For me, it's "Spew now, edit later" that works best.

Sometimes a poem comes out almost fully-formed, and needs only a few changes to polish it up. For me that's actually fairly common. That's partly because I don't push the river, I let it flow however it will. My writing discipline is not to try to force myself to write every day, to meet some workshop-defined ideal of productivity or daily practice. My discipline is to always be listening, always be ready, always have my tools at hand, so that when something does come forward to be written down, I'm always ready to do so. I don't write every day, and I don't try to. Experience has taught me that my writing discipline achieves more or less the same quantity and quality of good results as poets I know whose discipline is to write a couple hours every day; so which is the better practice? Neither. It's just different means to similar ends. I've met a few poets who seem baffled that their writing discipline isn't what everyone else does, or should do, and they particularly have a hard time understanding why I can write a good poem in a first or second draft when I don't write every day.

So, sometimes a poem comes out fully-formed. Sometimes a poem, or a song lyric, comes out in very rough form, with good images, but the words are all over the place, incoherent, and unformed. It's like throwing paint at the wall: sometimes you get the outline of an image, but it's not yet fully-formed. In such cases what often works for me is to revise by writing-through the words again. The cinematic flow of the images may be the same, even in the same order, although not always, but the words might be completely new and different, or assembled from the scraps in your sketch, in your journal. Sometimes I come back to things I wrote months or years ago, on these mornings when I want to write but don't feel very verbal. Every writer probably has a file of random ideas written down that were never developed, to dip into when the urge to write is there, but words aren't coming into one's mind the way they usually do.

This morning I went back in my journal and found some scraps of poem and image that I had written months ago, and re-formed them into a provisional song lyric. It probably needs more polishing, another revision or two, still.

I thought the process might be interesting, by way of example.

•

On a roadtrip through the Southwest last winter, I spent the night in Winnemucca, NV, which is a truck stop town on Hwy. 80 in a desert region of the Basin & Range. It's a good place to stop if you're driving across country, and there are hotels and restaurants there to support the custom. I spent the night there at the end of February 2012, on my way back home from California; the next day I got as far as Salt Lake City, then up to Jackson, WY, for a couple of days spent photographing in the Grand Tetons.

That night in Winnemucca a desert windstorm came through. The wind howled at the doorsill all night long. I stuffed towels around the edges of the window and door, but the room still smelled of alkaline desert dust, triggering my allergies. A couple of rain troughs were torn off the eaves during the night, and the trash cans were knocked over and blown down the line. Everyone in the hotel was on edge all night long, alert in our rooms to every sound, occasionally peering out between our window curtains to make sure our vehicles were okay.

In the morning, it was still window, but no longer howling. Puffy dark clouds filled the skies all day, making light and shadow patterns on the land all around, a mottled, piebald look. I wrote what follows in my journal the morning after the night-long storm; you can see how it's unformed, not really even a poem, just some impressions and phrases, ideas and images. So here's a good example of a bad poem from my own journal. I present it, unedited, for the purpose of demonstrating how a little revision and polishing can make a huge difference.

howling wind outside door
begging to get in
long night terrors
in morning's light dispelled
but hiding still behind
low swift-groaning clouds

raven in the dead grass
hovers wind-whipped and inarticulate
silent this morning
all thought drowned in wind

picture mountains
mottled by day and cloud-shadow
gray, tan and dun
snow-crowned, isolate
red side-walls canyoned with ice
picture them groaning
with pines bent over
giving birth to wind

•

sage winter white
palest aqua
solitary tree gold branched
against darker brown hills

raven hovers in swift wind
floating above sea of grass

•

last night I feared the wind
would trap me, the snow keep me
locked into a dream of sterile
hotel room, frozen, unable to venture out

now midday wind robs
the day of heat, freezing
but the mountains and clouded clay
are beautiful, and all moves as it would

•

trails of light
written by wind on stone

I wince to read that now. Not a few lines are pretentious and puerile, the language removed from the experience and fond of its own smartness—which is exactly the sort of crap I produce when I try to force myself to write, rather than go with the flow. (Which is why I don't write that way.) Words I'd never actually use in a finished piece. There are a few turns of phrase that show promise, but more that don't.

This is why we ought to leave such things in our journals, and never present them as finished poems. I do agree with some poetry critics that a lot of poems presented these days aren't finished, aren't revised enough, and are basically just journal-poems. The Beatific advice to write "first thought, best thought" actually only works if you're already an experienced bard, long-trained in poetics, and long-practiced in poetic improvisation.

Although this excerpt from my journal isn't good on its own, I see a kernel of something that could be good buried in it, if I can just tease it out, rework it, and make it something a little more focused and concise.

When I'm writing a song lyric, a key emotion or image is what makes the refrain, the image or phrase you come back to between verses. It needs to anchor the entire song. Sometimes the anchor can be the music, but when the song has a refrain, rather than just a recurring structure, you need to make sure the refrain has some of the strongest words or images in the entire lyric. This morning, I read through this material from my journal, and saw that the image that kept recurring was a raven hovering in the wind over a patch of dead brown grass. That was something I'd seen during the high winds, an image that stayed with me. So, let's take that and make it into the key image of the revised song lyric.

Also, on purely technical grounds, when I am writing a song lyric rather than a poem, I tend to count syllables-per-line, usually in a pattern of longer line followed by shorter. That pattern of variation also fits with much of melody I hear in my mind when writing song lyrics. It's mostly intuitive, not planned out far in advance. (I'm reporting here on what I observe of my own tendencies, not dictating music-theoretical rules.) Whether or not there is an end-rhyme, whether or not you are using meter of one kind or another, counting syllables gives you a framework to hang the imagery on. I prefer counting syllables to using formal metrics, as I think it's more flexible and fluid, and allows you to occasionally vary the count and stress of a line, and be able to throw in an extra syllable where needed. I strongly dislike iambic pentameter because few modern poets do it without making it sound sing-song and clichéd, so I avoid pentameter in my song lyrics. Yet since the English language is built on stressed and unstressed words, you can't really avoid using iambs per se; but you don't have to use them in rigid forms, you can be loose and improvisatory wherever possible. Especially when combing words with melody. Setting words to music changes all the rules—something poets ought to remember, although few get past their internalized formal prejudices to be able to do so.

Song lyrics tend to be more formal than "pure" poetry, especially in this age of free verse and organically-emerging poetic form, and by necessity: repetitive pattern assists memorization. There's reason the ballad form is so common in folk music: the pattern of word-stress and melody makes ballads memorable. So when I am writing a song lyric, or in this case polishing up some otherwise loose material into a song lyric, I tend to find ways to say it within the syllabic form. You can't always shoehorn a long poetic line into a form, sometimes you have to sacrifice it. When you're revising and polishing, you need to let go of what you've written in order to make better what you're about to write. You can't afford to cling to even your own words; you sometimes have to be brutal.

With all that in mind, this morning I produced what follows, which is a more structured and formal, and I think better, piece of writing: a song lyric which I will eventually set to music. It still needs some more revision, I think, and some individual word-choices haven't been settled yet, but overall I hope this can serve as an example of the revising and polishing process.

raven floats in morning wind
above a sea of grass

howling wind outside my door
begging to get in
long night terrors, fury's call
gone in morning light
linger still behind these clouds
moving fast and tight

raven silent in the sky
all sound drowned in wind

picture mountains gray and dun
bare tree on the ridge
piebald sun and shadow cloud
red side-wall canyons iced
picture groaning pines bent down
giving birth to wind

Things Ray Bradbury Said That I Know To Be True

More from The Paris Review interview with Ray Bradbury:

INTERVIEWER:
You’re self-educated, aren’t you?

BRADBURY:
Yes, I am. I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library. I used to steal magazines from a store on Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them. But with the library, it’s like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there’s so much to look at and read. And it’s far more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and you don’t have to listen to anyone. When I would see some of the books my kids were forced to bring home and read by some of their teachers, and were graded on—well, what if you don’t like those books?

I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.

All my librarian friends ought to be pleased with this. I certainly agree with it. Libraries are the great teachers. I go to my small town's rather good library regularly, and always find something new to be passionate about. Lately I've been impressed with their DVD collection, which includes a large number of movies you wouldn't expect to see in a small town public library, controversial films, films of poetic and artistic merit, a lot of The Criterion Collection.

Even though I did go to college, more than once, I can honestly say that Bradbury is right: your best education is self-education. Things you learn through experience, through living, which you store inside yourself forever. Things you learned from diving into libraries and reading late into the night.

INTERVIEWER:
How important has your sense of optimism been to your career?

BRADBURY:
I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That’s a different thing. If you behave every day of your life to the top of your genetics, what can you do? Test it. Find out. You don’t know—you haven’t done it yet. You must live life at the top of your voice! At the top of your lungs shout and listen to the echoes. I learned a lesson years ago. I had some wonderful Swedish meatballs at my mother’s table with my dad and my brother and when I finished I pushed back from the table and said, God! That was beautiful. And my brother said, No, it was good. See the difference?

Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.

This passage speaks to me very personally. Lately I've been able to admit to myself, after years of trying to please others and inhabit that consensus world that Bradbury was fortunate enough to avoid, that the only task I'm any good at is making things: creativity. It's become clear to me, maybe because the illness and surgery stripped away all the chaff, that my purpose in life has been to make art. It seems like I'm the last to know. I guess I've always been a late bloomer.

In several places, Bradbury talks about how he lives life intensely—things like saying dinner is beautiful rather than just good—and I know that's true for me as well. I know I live life very intensely. I know that hasn't always been easy for people who know me. I've decided that I don't care. It's my life, I'll live it however I choose to.

The day I decided that drugging uppity kids in the classroom was evil, and that anti-depressants should be looked at with suspicion, was the day I overheard two friends talking about me; it was a rough period in my life, and it been recommended to me that I try an anti-depressant to help me cope, so I did. I overheard two friends talking about me, saying that they both liked me better on the drug, that I was calmer and less volatile. Meanwhile, I had been feeling like I was made out of cardboard, that there was a foot of glass wall between me and the world, and I couldn't touch or feel anything. That was a formative experience for me, and those people are no longer my friends.

That doesn't mean I don't have bad days, still. It doesn't mean that I'm a raving opera queen all the time—a lot of the intensity of experience stays on the inside, and comes out mainly in the creative work. But it does mean that I feel very much alive.

INTERVIEWER:
The week after your wife passed away, you got back to writing. How were you able to do that?

BRADBURY:
Work is the only answer. I have three rules to live by. One, get your work done. If that doesn’t work, shut up and drink your gin. And when all else fails, run like hell!

Work is indeed the only answer. In fact, work is survival. I have repeated so often lately, because it's true, that many days the only thing that gets me through the day is making music, making art, writing a poem. Making art has been my way to survive. If even on the worst days I can make one new thing out of nothing, I can count it as worth it, and a reason to go on. As the illness and surgery took away the chaff from my life, I began to truly realize how important work is. Like Bradbury, my art is my work. (Elsewhere he comments that he's grateful that his work is so much fun.) I don't expect to ever retire: I expect to be writing, or making art, or music, on the day I die. That's what Bradbury did. Even after his stroke, late in life, he still wrote via dictation when he could no longer type. A new book of stories came out not too long ago.

INTERVIEWER:
Do you write for an ideal reader or a particular audience?

BRADBURY:
Every time you write for anyone, regardless of who they are, no matter how right the cause you may believe in, you lie. Steinbeck is one of the few writers out of the thirties who’s still read, because he didn’t write for causes at all. He wrote human stories that happened to represent causes indirectly. The Grapes of Wrath and his other books are not political treatises. Fahrenheit 451 is in a way a political treatise, but it isn’t, because all it is saying, emotionally, is: Everyone leave everyone else alone!

INTERVIEWER:
Does literature, then, have any social obligation?

BRADBURY:
Not a direct one. It has to be through reflection, through indirection. Nikos Kazantzakis says, “Live forever.” That’s his social obligation. The Saviors of God celebrates life in the world. Any great work does that for you. All of Dickens says live life at the top of your energy.

It means a lot to me that Bradbury mentions Kazantsakis, and particularly The Saviors of God, which is both a summation of Kazantsakis' worldview and a call to live life to the fullest. It means a lot to me to have Bradbury validate my own life, indirectly, by mentioning a book, The Saviors of God, which changed my own life, and influenced so profoundly that I can rarely even talk about it. (If you've never read it, or read about it, here it is in full.)

Elsewhere Bradbury talks about how literature is a mirror that reflects the world. Science fiction is really a funhouse mirror in which we see the present through the lens of the future. He uses the metaphor of Perseus seeing the Medusa in the mirror of his shield, which allows him to survive her gaze, and take her head off. So the last thing literature ought to be is a sermon. There's nothing duller than a novel that preaches at you, that tells you how to behave, but has no life of its own.

Literature (and all art) can be a prayer, in that the best prayers consist of two activities: to praise, and to say "Thank you."

A lot of Bradbury's writings are praise, which he rarely admits to directly, but you can see it in the very intensity and pleasure of his writing. Whether he describes flying a kite, or running from a dinosaur chasing you, his language takes you into the experience, and makes you feel alive. Between the lines in Bradbury's writing, between the actual words themselves, there can often be found an inarticulate joy that can't be contained in words, something so profound that it settles into your bones, something that his words manage to evoke without ever saying so directly. And when you finish reading one of Bradbury's short stories that ends in one of those moments of articulated inarticulate joy, you often feel like saying "Thank you." My gods, that was a beautiful dinner!

RIP Ray Bradbury

One of the grand masters of fantasy and science fiction, Ray Bradbury, has just passed over at age 91. It's all over the literary news, although I doubt many who aren't readers or writers will notice. Bradbury was a writer's writer, revered by writers and readers alike, who impressed and captivated everybody from generations of science fiction fans who later became writers themselves, to Christopher Isherwood, who thought Bradbury to be one of the most original writers he had ever read.

One mark of a great writer is that you can go back to their books years later and still have the same experience, be immersed in the same feelings and images, that you had the very first time you read them. They endure. The list of writers I can honestly say this about, that each time I read them is like the first time, is a very short list; it includes, among a few others, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, and Ray Bradbury.

For me, there have been only a few writers who ever successfully conveyed the experience of being a young teen boy in small-town Midwestern towns in summer as well as Bradbury did. His novel Dandelion Wine is one of the best novels I have read more than ten times, each time as fresh as the last. Something Wicked This Way Comes was a novel that actively terrified me when I read it as a teenager; and it remains compellingly scary. His essential short novel for young adults, The Halloween Tree, is a great adventure story that also is a detailed history of the roots and origins of the festivities of All Hallow's. Many people know Bradbury best for his themed collections of short stories, many of which have been made into movies, including The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. And then there's Fahrenheit 451, an Orwellian novel about a repressive future society in which literacy itself is banned.

Bradbury has often been ahead of the literary curve, writing in styles or exploring subject matters that other writers only came to decades later. His short story "A Sound of Thunder," about the dangerous changes in history that can be caused by tiny careless mistakes made by time travelers, has been adapted into more than one movie, has turned up in the literature again and again, been the premise of TV shows, and even has a connection to the origins of chaos theory and fractal mathematics. The principal known as the butterfly effect is what I'm talking about here. This is so common a theme in speculative literature now that it's become an archetype itself.

When I was a young reader, already having read lots of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and other "hard SF" writers before encountering Bradbury, and already having had some science training myself, I was at times put off by Bradbury's relaxed interest in accurate scientific detail; he openly admitted that he was interested in the human stories first and foremost, and often skated on the technical details. But my initial doubts about the details of his stories were quickly overwhelmed by the sheer intense and powerful beauty of his language, and I was quickly won over. What Bradbury was, was a master storyteller. Sometimes his stories were set amidst the trappings of science fiction, such as rocket ships, and trips to other planets, but they were always human stories. He made you think, and his stories remain in memory long afterwards. I can think of several of his stories that are clear in my memory still, in many different genres.

Dandelion Wine is technically magical realism—written long before that term was coined to apply to Latin America authors such as Garcia Marquez; so in a way Bradbury invented the style—but what is so incredibly engaging about Bradbury's novel is how emotionally real it is. It is incredibly personal. You know people like the characters in Dandelion Wine. Perhaps you've even been those people, at some point in your life. The episode in the novel, that was originally published as a short story called "The Sound of Summer Running," is one absolutely vivid in my imagination, because it perfectly conveyed the total experience of getting new sneakers at the beginning of summer, and what that meant to a boy just freed from school for the season—right down to the smells.

So I'm feeling sad tonight. I will miss not seeing more new stories from Ray Bradbury, who wrote every day for decades. I will miss Bradbury not only for his fiction but also for his commentaries on life. His book on writing, Zen in the Art of Writing, is essential reading for every writer. It's one of the most genuinely inspirational books on writing that I've ever read.

Finally, I will let the master speak for himself. Here is an excerpt or two from Bradbury's Paris Review interview:

INTERVIEWER:
Why do you write science fiction?

RAY BRADBURY:
Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

Imagine if sixty years ago, at the start of my writing career, I had thought to write a story about a woman who swallowed a pill and destroyed the Catholic Church, causing the advent of women’s liberation. That story probably would have been laughed at, but it was within the realm of the possible and would have made great science fiction. If I’d lived in the late eighteen hundreds I might have written a story predicting that strange vehicles would soon move across the landscape of the United States and would kill two million people in a period of seventy years. Science fiction is not just the art of the possible, but of the obvious. Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

INTERVIEWER:
Does science fiction satisfy something that mainstream writing does not?

BRADBURY:
Yes, it does, because the mainstream hasn’t been paying attention to all the changes in our culture during the last fifty years. The major ideas of our time—developments in medicine, the importance of space exploration to advance our species—have been neglected. The critics are generally wrong, or they’re fifteen, twenty years late. It’s a great shame. They miss out on a lot. Why the fiction of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can’t explain it, except in terms of intellectual snobbery.

May Sarton

Born May 3, 1912, in Wondelgem, Belgium, and a naturalized U.S. citizen from the age of two, she remained something of an outsider, which no doubt made her a better observer. That's probably one of the reasons I have always appreciated her: a perpetual outsider, not always a happy one, occasionally caustic, but with an eye for detail that missed little of what was around her. Nobody sees what's actually there better than a stranger. Her poems were usually compressed lyrics, often reflective of the universal within the particular, often full of those details that an outsider sees. Sarton didn't follow any poetic fashions or schools, and was not a self-conscious literary experimenter like many of her generation. In her novels, which I would also call lyrical, she had a fine ear for the subtleties of relationships and human family drama. Some of her very best fiction is about love, insightful and funny and harrowing and profound all at once.

Sarton considered herself first and foremost a poet, with more than a dozen volumes of poetry published, but she also published nine volumes of journals and nineteen novels. It seems likely that her journals and memoirs will be what she is most remembered for, as they remain her most popular books. They continue to inspire new generations of readers. There is an honesty, even in edited form, about the difficulties of reconciling life and art. Journal of a Solitude is still one of the most often read of the journals, a story of living alone on the Maine coast, mostly cut off from others, with the occasional visitor: such an occasion as makes an artist go within and examine one's own darknesses and shadows.

In 1965 she published her tenth novel, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, which describes a woman’s quest to belong in the world as an artist and a lesbian. After that novel was published, to some controversy even though her reputation as a novelist was already well-established, her later journals were more revealing about her own love for women. In Journal of a Solitude she wrote, "The fear of homosexuality is so great that it took courage to write Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing . . . a novel about a woman homosexual who is not a sex maniac, a drunkard, a drug-taker, or in any way repulsive, to portray a homosexual who is neither pitiable nor disgusting, without sentimentality. . . ." Eventually she admitted what many readers believed, that this novel was autobiographical in spirit, if not literally so in every detail.

Nonetheless, she always insisted that she wanted to known as a poet and novelist, not a lesbian novelist. Some of that of course was the more circumspect times, and the generation she belonged to. There was some critical backlash against Sarton after that, but she has always had a devoted and dedicated fan following. I find this interesting because it means she was always a success to her readers, even if some of the critics were not supportive. What artist doesn't feel sympathy with that?

That double assessment continues to this day. Every so often I still get comments on my blog post here about the day I spent in Nelson, NH, where Sarton lived before Maine, and where she is buried: May Sarton at Nelson, NH. Yet two years after Sarton died in 1995, Margot Peters published May Sarton: A Biography. I read it a few years ago. It's thorough, discusses her entire life, her most important friendships, the places where she lived, and what she wrote. It's also a hatchet job, a biography that is biased towards depicting Sarton as an impossible person who was hard on her friends and angry all the time. Well, she was indeed restless, tempestuous, and strong-willed—but to be a woman artist in her times, one needed to be strong-willed. She doesn't paint herself as perfect in her journals, she doesn't pretend to be without fears or hard times. Nonetheless the journals contain moments of exceptional beauty, of near-awe, of pathos. Any artist who struggles with making a living and making art can sympathize; that many readers do just that speaks highly for her relevance. Plant Dreaming Deep, her first mature memoir, a series of short pieces about her house and friends in Nelson, set a new standard for memoir and journal writing; it remains a lucid and engrossing book, in some ways exceptionally brilliant. So I didn't like Peters' biography very much; it felt quite unbalanced. I think we're still waiting for a more balanced, definitive biography.

Songwriting: Where It Begins

What starts a song lyric, or a poem, going? What triggers any moment of inspiration that becomes a work of art? Do you need a specific muse to inspire you?

Almost anything. Anything can trigger that inspiration, it tends to come over like a wave or a sudden feeling. I've never needed a specific muse, anything will do. Art-making is the artist's response to life.

An aside: Any time the words "muse" and "inspire" are mentioned, a certain clan of poets and songwriters feels like they must insist that writing doesn't require a muse. They're right, but their assertion goes too far. They neglect to admit that some of the time, inspiration does happen, and there is a muse. These assertions often come from the craft-oriented wing of writing, those who write with intention and purpose, and use all their craft to work hard at making the best art that they can. I applaud that. However, I'm also very well aware that inspiration does happen, and it cannot always be explained—or explained away. And sometimes, there is a person who triggered it. A painter paints her lover. A composer's wife hums while working in the garden, inciting a symphony of song. Art-making is the artist's response to life, and inspiration can come from anywhere.

A second aside: Lots of people think that your muse, if it's your beloved soul-mate, inspires you to your heights of artistry. That is the romantic myth. it's true sometimes, but all too often poets perpetrate one of those numerous insipid love poems that plague the world with their clichéd repetitions. In fact, most people have romantic notions about love and its connection to inspiration that go too far. Not all muses are beneficent. And not all that a muse inspires is loving, praising, or beatific. Loving is not always a pastoral romp through fields of glory. I'll tell you who your real sou-mate is: the person who most pushes you towards growth, towards becoming a better person. Your soul-mate isn't in fact usually the person who you adore, but the person who pushes you, who pisses you off, who you can't get out of your head even if you try. Sometimes the muse inspires an angry poem.

That's how I wrote this poem, as a response to a moment when the person I most love in this world was really pissing me off. It happens. The most important cusp in a love relationship comes when you choose what you will do next. That moment didn't last, but I am left with a poem I still like. In this instance, as occasionally happens, I was inspired and wrote this poem at white heat in one sitting, in one of my journals. As is also common when writing at white heat, the final version is not far off the first draft, as can be seen from the journal page in question:



Many of my poems, and now song lyrics, have begun from specific inspirations I can recall, and detail, such as the previous example. Art-making is my response to life experience. Sometimes you spin off from another idea that occurred to you, and it just starts to flow. It can be mysterious in its arrival, but you can learn to notice and recognize with experience. There have been poems that were triggered by a person, an encounter, a phrase in a conversation; so sometimes a person does serve as muse, if you will.

A recent instance of multiple threads coming together to inspire a song lyric can be seen in a song I wrote in New Mexico, on my recent roadtrip. I wrote a poem while in Albuquerque, and posted it here: Colder Moons. An online friend made a comment to the poem affirming the poem's last lines:

. . . A thread
runs through memory, links every ground you ever camped on.
A surfeit of tent, an excess of fresh air. Brewing sweet tea
over wood coals some cold blue pre-dawn, embrace
a kind of solace. Some things don't need
to be forgiven.

I was grateful for the comment, and it got me to thinking. Not many days later I took the last line of the poem, "Some things don't need to be forgiven," and used it as the first line for a new song. The line had stayed with me, but having it affirmed in my friend's comment gave it extra weight in my art-making mind.

Here's the first two verses of this new song, written soon after the poem and comment:

Some things don't need to be forgiven,
like stars that fall from desert skies,
like tears that urge the heart to widen,
like a newborn daughter's cries.

Some places in the heart are broken,
it's friendship's edge we use to bind
ourselves together to each other,
your limping half-healed heart to mine.

. . .

This completed song lyric is one of the new songs I am working on now, setting the words to music. It's part of a group of songs I wrote during the roadtrip, and after.

Writing the words for a song usually comes first, for me, although I do sometimes hear the melody at the same time, coming forward together with the words. For this song, the melody did come to me right along with the words, and finishing the total of four verses and refrain to the song was partly a matter of fitting the words to the song in its established melodic pattern, and partly about writing what I wanted to say.

It can become a process of getting it down while you're in the flow, then cleaning it up later, although in this instance once I got going it pretty much flowed. I find myself writing a song like this mostly in one sitting, getting it all down as much as I can; when the words start to come, it can take a few minutes, or an hour, to get them down. Then I set it aside for awhile, to come back after a few days, to polish, clean up, sometimes rearrange lyrics or phrases, and generally rewrite as needed. Taking some time between the initial inspiration and the rewrite often allows you to be more objective, or at least somewhat detached, so that you can look at the song as a song, and start to hear it being sung in your head.

That's how the writing process can go, at least some of the time, from inspiration to finish. Other songs take a lot longer to beat into shape, which can be a process of gathering fragments onto a page in my journal and then figuring out how to fit them together. Your craft as a songwriter comes into play in particular when you rewrite and polish and clean up.

Don't rewrite too soon in the process, is my advice, because at least for me that can completely kill the inspiration. Stay in one mindset while writing, use the other for editing and rewriting. Use the inspiration for as long as you can, for as long as it hangs around. Get down as much as you can. Be greedy with whatever inspires you. You have a lot more time for rewrites than you do for inspiration. When the white heat cools to more calculating craft, that's the time for editing. That's another reason I set a song aside for awhile, before coming back to look at it more objectively. You can spot things when it's further off in the distance that you'd miss entirely when you're still in the midst of being inspired.