Lesson 9 · Elias

Rewriting as Practice

Writing is rewriting. This is not a cliché — it is a statement of craft. The first draft is raw material. It contains the feeling, the impulse, the seed. But it almost never contains the finished lyric. The finished lyric lives in the second draft, the fifth draft, the tenth.

The rest of this lesson

Elias takes this apart properly inside Songmatter — the rest of the lesson, the exercise that goes with it, and a critic who reads what you write back.

Read the rest