“You find the story by discovering what the story is not.”
Mary Robinette Kowal, Writing Excuses (Season 19, Episode 1)
Most of the plant is underground.
I finished this book yesterday. The whole read was a delightful insight into the creative process, but my favorite insights were those about failure which mirror my own feelings about creative compost.
“The act of writing, for me, has most often been a process of failing repeatedly. It's the only way I know how to write! And in the moment of "failure," at the desk, banging one's "head against a wall," it's nearly impossible to see or feel the value in it.
But when I step back, I see a different picture. I know that Hadestown is—and this goes for any creative endeavor, I reckon—so much more than what meets the eye or the ear. What is seen and heard onstage is the blooming flower, but most of the plant is underground.
Every line, verse, or chorus—every idea any of us who worked on it ever had, even the ones that never saw the light of day—they're down there. They're the roots of the plant, and the flower wouldn't exist without them. The ones who bloom in the bitter snow bloom because they are supported from below by a thousand tries and failures.”
And (about the final line of the show), “The seed lay underground for a decade, and when the conditions were right ... it bloomed again. Keep trying.”
I was also struck by how slow this creative process was. Especially compared to the rush I’ve been feeling about writing novels. Workshopping a Broadway show is an extended collaborative process made better by everyone involved. This show improved through iterations with various collaborators for well over a decade before blooming into the show it is today.
Source: Working on a Song: The Lyrics of Hadestown by Anaïs Mitchell
Writing is like gardening.
“You’re raking around in the dirt, pulling up weeds. Flowers you love and find beautiful die on you. But not for nothing; they go back into the soil, and they nourish it. It’s the act of raking that prepares the ground, and it’s the seeds of those dead beautiful flowers that replant themselves in it and eventually come up right. The “right” thing could not exist without the “wrong” ones.”
Source: Working on a Song: The Lyrics of Hadestown by Anaïs Mitchell