About Writing

Writing is an interesting exercise in creativity, since you have to craft ideas, stories, and even sentences, but also an exercise in production, because whatever way you look at it, you are attempting to work. In this sense I could almost say that I have a part-time job. Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. Regardless of what you call it, writing is a lot of work. You have to constantly think about what you are writing but also you have to be constantly aware of what you did write and what you will write.

You could probably ask any writer and they would tell you that writing is grueling process full of frustration, confusion, and large doses of caffeine. It doesn't matter whether you are writing a paper for a class, a proposal for work, an article in a newspaper, lyrics for a new song, the code for a program, the first draft of a novel, or even a blog entry. It takes a long time to complete a work you are fully satisfied with. And I'm speaking from experience here.

Of course, your input normally directly effects your output. I'm finding it hard to believe this to be true, however. I have been going through this process hardcore for the last couple of months, since I am writing a book. On many occasions I have put in an immense amount of time but gotten very little actual writing done. I guess, however, that this can be said about many creative endeavors.

There are always thoughts about what might or might not happen, thoughts about whether this will succeed or fail. If you get too caught up in those thoughts, then you end up spending more time distracting yourself with make-believe situations than you do actually writing your story. This has happened to me a few times. The problem is, you only really realize that it happened after the fact.

All this discussion isn't even getting into all the issues, outside out time and effort, that involve crafting a story. You need a believable plot line, rich and interesting locations and characters, and well chosen dialogue. There are also other issues that you must consider such as, "What is the point of this story?", "What sort of message do I hope to convey?", and "What do I want the reader to feel about this or that?". Those are all issues that an author needs to address and I'm trying to hit them when I get to them.

The Evolution of a Song

Lots and lots of tracks and samples.

So, today I went through some of my old recordings searching for some illusive lost gem. What I ended up doing was going through a butt-load of my old recordings on Pro Tools and laughing at myself because, either, the sound quality was so abysmal, or, because the songs were just sooooooo bad. And I mean really bad. It is one of those times when you listen to a song and say "Please tell me I didn't write that. I did? God dammit!"

But I was also amazed at some of the stuff I found. Especially one piece that I had done for a project in my first year of college. What was even stranger is that I still happen to have about 9 different revisions of the song in my iTunes. I decided to start from the earliest and work my way up.

Now let me explain this project first. For the assignement we were give a set of 53 musical patterns known as In C. This semi-aleatoric piece was composed by Terry Riley in 1964 and is supposed to be played by a large ensemble of about 35 musicians. The musicians are supposed to just jump in randomly while a constant C is played on the piano. (Thanks Wikipedia!! I could not remember all of that.) You can listen to an original recording here, though, I would, in no way, suggest that you listen to more than about 1 minute and a half of it. As well an explanation of the piece with the separate musical score can be seen here.