Category: Composing

I’d had it with music.

Composing was too hard, too frustrating.

I couldn’t figure out how to get the sounds I heard into my head onto the paper. Worse—I wasn’t even sure if I should put those sounds to paper.

So I became an editor.

Or rather, I added the editing minor to my undergrad degree.

And it was the best choice I ever made for my music.

At the time, the main professors in BYU’s editing minor were Mel Thorne and Marvin Gardner. Now retired, both men even at that time belonged to a group I affectionately considered ”The Greatest Grandpas of Utah Valley.”

Mel’s background was in academic and book publishing. He was more down-to-earth and task-oriented.

Marvin’s background was in magazine publishing. He was more effusive and gentle.

Both were consummate professionals and unflaggingly generous in the mentorship they gave to their students.

After multiple classes from both professors and an internship with Mel, I came away with a transformed view of writing and editing.

Up until that point, like most of us, I dreaded getting my English papers back drenched in red from all the corrections teachers would put on them.

I associated writing with “being graded” and editing with “the person doing the grading.”

Mel and Marvin utterly transformed how I understood this relationship.

They showed me that, in the professional world, editors and writers are allies, not adversaries. The goal is for the team to complete the task well and efficiently—not any one individual.

Writers who insist on polishing their writing to perfection before sharing don’t just waste everyone’s time, they act defensively in bad faith.

The whole purpose of having an editor is so that the writer doesn’t have to get everything right at first. The editor-writer team can produce better prose faster when they work together than when the writer tries to make everything perfect first.

When I understood that my job as a writer was simply to get my ideas on the page, not to perfect them, that liberated me.

Even if I hadn’t fully articulated my ideas. Even if I couldn’t yet fully understand them. I knew, “The editor will help me fix this!” (Editors are a lot like therapists, helping you articulate the things you feel but don’t yet understand.)

I saw that my job was simply to give the editor something to work with.

This point was hammered home last week during office hours in the Wizarding School for Composers.

One of my students, Joseph Fletcher, shared the “two rules of creativity” he had come to understand from our work this semester:

1. “Don’t be afraid of a half-baked idea.”
2. “Don’t settle for the half-baked idea.”

Rule One describes the writer’s role. Rule Two describes the editor’s.

As creatives, we often struggle with accepting the validity of both roles.

In Joseph’s case, he explained, “I think I’ve been in Rule Two for a long time, but I haven’t been very good at Rule One. I just mull and mull, so my progress is slow. My willingness to just throw something at the page and then start iterating from there—that’s the thing in my process I’m hoping to adapt.”

Many others have the opposite problem: They’ll gladly generate and generate, but when it comes time to refine their ideas, they struggle.

But knowing that these two roles exist and can work in harmony is half the battle.

It didn’t just make writing prose easier and more joyful for me, it did the same for my music. And it can do the same for yours.

Which role, editor or writer, do you relate to more?

(Photo: Nic McPhee/Flickr)

When I was in elementary school, my siblings and I went to the chess club at our local library. 

(This was back when playing chess would make you a “nerd.” Or, at least, back when I might have cared about being called a nerd.)

Chess club solidified my hazy idea of what all the pieces did. It also taught me a few fancy moves like “en passant” and “castling.” Best of all, we had pizza at every meeting.

My time in chess club ended when I moved up to middle school. I had fun, but I was no Bobby Fischer. Chess.com still pegs my Elo rating at 859 (novice).

If only mastering chess were as easy as going to chess club (and eating pizza)!

The first challenge of chess is learning how the pieces move. It can be a lot to remember starting out.

Once you’ve mastered those moves, the bigger challenge is coordinating a larger strategy.

For a long time after chess club, I didn’t like playing chess, because it involved a lot of thinking ahead. I didn’t realize there were predictable patterns for the opening, mid-game, and end game moves. 

Since I had a limited understanding of good strategies and how to execute them, playing chess felt like guessing.

Composing music is just like this. 

Even a simple hymn harmonization encompasses a lot of details. 

You have to put in all this work to master chorale writing—the music theory equivalent of “learn how all the chess pieces move.”

Despite that work, mastering those skills doesn't really prepare you to coordinate a larger compositional strategy. Particularly when you learn, “Well, actually, in real music, the notes move a bunch of different ways in addition, or even in contradiction, to what you’ve be taught.”

It’s enough for any aspiring composer—and sometimes even professional composers—to throw up their hands and say, “I’m just going to stick with what I know!”

But, as in chess, in music there are patterns and principles that you can learn. You don’t always learn these in music school. Even when you do, they’re often delivered ad hoc and piecemeal.

This is why I created the Wizarding School for Composers: to collect all these strategies in one place so that other composers wouldn’t have to spend a decade-plus piecing them together like I did.

I was mortified.

I had been invited to conduct my Calvin and Hobbes–inspired piece, “Go Exploring,” during a reading session of a visiting ensemble.

The musicians were struggling with the music I had written in general and with a certain 7/8 bar in particular. They had been rehearsing the piece without a conductor, and then called me in when the going got tough.

And boy did it ever get tough—on me!

I couldn’t conduct the passage in a way that helped them grasp what I was doing musically.

They eventually muddled through a credible rendition of it.

But I felt terrible about the piece I had written, even though the recording turned out okay. (My sweet composition teacher, David Sargent, even said, too: “The only thing I wish I could change about that piece was that I wrote it myself.”)

Too often when I was learning to compose, I found myself in situations like this: writing music that was needlessly difficult.

I wrote complicated music, because I didn’t know how elegantly to capture the magic of what I heard in my head.

That embarrassing reading session, more than any other event in my musical education, lit a fire in me to figure out how to express complex musical ideas simply.

There’s a good chance that you, too, are held back in your composing because of how complicated you perceive music to be.

• You avoid composing because you don’t know how to create the complex sounds you hear.
• You don’t believe your music is good enough because it doesn’t sound complex in your ears.
• You think that vivid, sophisticated musical ideas aren’t for you because you’re “just a performer.”

Just know this:

The simplicity of your musical ideas isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

You don’t need a massive vocabulary to create great music.

Although you may not know it yet, your original music is a gift that others will treasure.

Everyone is capable of making music that matters.

That includes you.