Letting the Bad Ones Have Their Turn

A friend of mine once said that writing is like having a thousand words queued up inside of your brain. The problem is that the best ones are stuck in the back, waiting their turn, which means you've got to spit out all the bad ones first.

My problem as a fiction writer is that I never want to let the bad ones have their turn. I just sit there with my mouth clamped shut, pen hovered, waiting for the good ones to leapfrog their way to the front.

They rarely do.


As a musician, I see every song as an opportunity to learn and to grow. My problem as a fiction writer is that there's no joy for me in the learning and growing; I see it only as an affirmation that I'm not already good enough. But as a musician? I don't expect to be good. When I write bad music, I'm unsurprised and unbothered and I move on. And when I write good music? I'm amazed and I'm thrilled and I move on.

The point of this post is to say that I write a lot of amazingly bad music. For every song that I post, there are a thousand deleted takes of me singing the most ridiculous lyrics, banging around on the keyboard like a six-year-old, and hitting notes that cannot and should not be heard by the human ear.

And that's the whole point of something like February Album Writing Month or 50 Songs in 90 Days: To get to the good ones, you've got to let the bad ones have their turn.

photo courtesy of meredith_farmer