Right now, I’m in the middle of going through my first draft of my YA novel and making major revisions — and it’s tough! I have a draft of one section tucked in my bag that’s peppered with changes. I’m shifting paragraphs around, slimming down the description, working to pump up the action, and rethinking the way the whole story unfolds and the way I’ve set up my plot points. And as I’m doing all this, I’m hoping that I don’t strip away too much — that my characters and my story are rich enough to hold a reader’s interest. It’s easy to become overly serious about this process and push the angst button.
That’s why I was so happy — relieved, really — to learn more about how Bruce Springsteen put together his classic album, Darkness on the Edge of Town. Bruce, it seems, was a bit of an overachiever: by one account, he wrote 70 songs for the album, but ended up using only 10. Apparently, in developing Darkness and other albums over the years, our boy Bruce has played fast and loose with some of his creations, moving riffs and words around from one song to another. This often resulted in what he called “multiversions of all kinds of things.”
“We were always pulling things apart. I had like a big junkyard of stuff….If something wasn’t complete, I just pulled out the parts I liked, like pulling the parts you need from one car (and) putting ‘em in the other, so that car runs.”
Calling his artistic output “a big junkyard of stuff” is a bit over the top for me. But what I love about this quote is Bruce’s attitude about making things work. He doesn’t view himself as an artiste’, but as a craftsman, a tinkerer. The whole image of the creative process as a kind of car is refreshing, isn’t it? You just pull out your tools, get under the hood, dump this, move that, tinker a bit, tune things up and you’re ready to ride. Revising, here I come!
As a fellow writer I find your blog very interesting. As a Springsteen fan I totally agree that I find a lot of inspiration in the things he has been saying recently about The Promise. Love to hear him speaking about his creative process. And the way he says: “It’s my job. It’s what I do.” Helped me to realize writing is my job. That’s what I do. And the best way to do it, is by sheer hard work.
Hi Marile,
Thanks for your lovely comment — I’m so glad you’re enjoying my blog! I love the Bruce comment you passed on: “It’s my job. It’s what I do.”
So often I think we mystify writing and the creative process and forget
that it’s really all about the page — doing the hard work of sitting down
and wrestling with words. One thing I’ve learned: our muse shows up
when we do (that’s from an earlier post called “Muse Management”).
There’s plenty of mystery involved in writing but I’ve found
that there’s also a lot of crafting and tinkering, too. Fun, isn’t it?
Hope you’ll keep reading and sharing your thoughts.
Write on!
Karin
> Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2010 20:32:04 +0000