“I hate writing, but I love having written” - Dorothy Parker

There’s nothing like packing your entire life in the trunk of your car and moving to Nashville to be a hit songwriter to give you writer’s block. I didn’t consider that on the day that I arrived in Song Town that 10,000 other people did too or that my dental hygienist, the crystal springs delivery guy and every waiter was also really a songwriter.

I would go to the Blue Bird cafe and hear some of the world’s greatest writers sing the best thing I’d ever heard. I remember one guy saying “I wrote this one on Wednesday”, it was Friday and that was one of the greatest things I’d ever heard. Then later, back at my one room apartment, my fingers would hover over the piano keys and as I would try to squeak out something half as good. The first line would come out slow and shy and awkward like it didn’t deserve to be in that town. I would judge it immediately for not measuring up and then I would hear my inner critic yell “you should just be a chiropractor”!.

It was hard, it was work, and it was bad for the most part. At every open mic, and lecture I would go attend to hear one of my songwriting heroes tell their story and share their writing process, I was waiting to hear someone admit that at some point they hated writing but not one of them ever did. I had left all of my family and friends and was down to a couple of hundred dollars. I was betting it all on a dream that I hated. How did it make sense that the thing I loved the most, I hated doing?

Then one day I heard the Dorothy Parker quote “I hate writing, but I love having written” and it all clicked. Finally someone had succinctly put into words what I was going through. I didn’t hate writing, I hated being bad at it, I hated how hard it was. As I grew and learned and gathered tools for writing, I realized how much I would hate to build a house if I didn’t have a saw, a hammer, the blue print, the vision. I would love having a house, but hate building it.

There is the mystery of songwriting, there is the muse, there is the gift of melody but there is also craft and when I quit banging my head on the table at Denny’s going through my own head down the alphabet for a rhyme for “love” (glove, shove, dove), I discovered the rhyming dictionary and different rhyme types like love/rush or love/was. The world opened a little, I had options. I leaned into craft, to tools and techniques and I got faster and better and songwriting became, fun. I realized that I never hated it, I hated how hard it was, how limited and frustrated I felt by working off instinct alone.

With craft, you increase your awareness and look at the symmetry and asymmetry and the higher art that deals with line lengths and section lengths and prosody. Tuning into the right note with the right word and knowing what chord will break your heart.

It can be scary to know too much about this elusive craft and can feel like you’re pulling back the curtain on Oz. What I tell my students is that “you can’t know too much, but you can think too much” so learn the craft and then ask it to wait outside or across the room while you light your candle and write your song. Then then the whoosh of inspiration has fled the building, you can reach over and pick up your tools and write a great song.