As a songwriter myself, I hear this all the time.

“I wrote this song in like five minutes dude!”

“It just came to me! Like ten minutes and it was done!”

I have come to learn that this is not necessarily a good thing. Sure, inspiration striking at a moment’s notice is amazing. Generally though, you need more than ten minutes to truly refine an idea into something tangible and good. Songwriting is hard work. Writing is hard work. Painting is hard work. Ten minutes is not an acceptable amount of time to spend on…well…anything really. Maybe making hard boiled eggs? Then ten minutes is most likely to long.

Heck, it takes me longer to write these little blurbs for my cartoons than ten minutes!

A common “humble brag” in the songwriting community is someone saying how quickly they wrote their newest or most popular song. In my view this is not something to brag about at all. Did you know Leonard Cohen wrote around eighty draft verses for his opus “Hallelujah”? 80!!! How long do you think that took? If you say ten minutes, then you are very wrong. It would be statistically impossible to write 80 verses in ten minutes. The correct answer is that it took Cohen five years initially to write “Hallelujah” and another ten years of refining it and shaping it as audiences slowly discovered it before it became a hit. In essence, the song may never be fully completed, just transcending time and evolving to this day. Even after his passing in 2016. It wasn’t even really a hit for Cohen but rather for John Cale in 1994 and again for Jeff Buckley after his sudden passing in 1997. So basically, in 1979 Cohen began writing it. He then recorded it himself in 1984 and not until 1994 did it really start to make an impact.

My point is, quicker is not always better. Practically anything of importance or significance took a lot of time to refine. The Mona Lisa, The Sistine Chapel, The Great Gatsby, The Canterbury Tales, etc.…these infamous works of art were not born in one shot of inspiration. They took many, many hours of torment and revision before becoming the masterpieces that they are today.

This is what can be so inherently maddening about our current society and how we develop, create and process material. These days, people have adapted to quantity over quality, and that breaks my heart. If you are a “creator” these days, the general rule of thumb is that you need to be producing “content” nearly every day to build and retain an audience. The end result is rushed, underdeveloped creations saturating the creative space. I’m not saying that amazing stuff doesn’t still get out there, but rather that it is much more infrequent than it was in the days where artists refined their work meticulously before releasing it out into the world. Painstaking detail has become the exception rather than the rule, and we as consumers have grown accustomed to it. Progress I suppose?

For someone like me, this is a catch 22. I don’t tend to work all that fast generally, so maybe this is why this all bothers me so much? Maybe I am just not cut out to be a creative nowadays?

For instance: In terms of my music, I have been recording my new album for a couple years now and it is slated to be released sometime in the spring of 2023. That is just the recording process! It probably took my 2 years to write and revise all the material and it will take another 3 years to record it once all is said and done. Now, I do admit that if I was not working a full time job Monday through Friday each week, I probably could have sped up the process quite a bit. However, it still would have most likely taken me at least a year and a half to finish. I re-write the songs almost constantly as I go out and perform them for live audiences. It’s their collective reactions to a song, in real time, that lets me learn what is working and what isn’t. Sort of like a focus group.

As for cartoons, I don’t have that same luxury, I have to pump them out a bit quicker to hit my twice a week deadline. The idea usually comes quick and then I ponder over the word economy and phrasing for a while. Say a half hour or so. Then comes the sketch. Then rewriting the captions to fit better within the sketch. Next a final sketch. Then inking and finally coloring. The absolute fastest I’ve ever completed a cartoon from start to finish is about an hour and forty five minutes. Generally, cartoons take me about three to four hours total to bring to life. I do two cartoons a week. So let’s say that I devote eight hours a week, or one full working day, to create the two cartoons.

So, the next time an artist tells you that they wrote their newest song in just ten minutes before playing it for you, you will know one of two things. Either they are lying to you, or buckle up, because that song is going to SUCK!

That’s today’s cartoon folks! (In case you are wondering, this one took about three hours to write and produce) I’ll be back Sunday with the next one. Until then, keep on keeping on.

Cheers,

~tod