I feel the most natural thing is for music to come that way because it's sort of like poetry. Though I do think with poets that I like, like Charles Olson or Ezra Pound, they were rewriting constantly, until the poem becomes a diamond.But with music I don't really feel that way.
You let the story cool off and then, instead of rewriting it, you relive it.
Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten.
That rewriting of literary history is most obvious in the case of The Yage Letters, where I was able to show that the true history inverts the official one.
I didn't like people rewriting my dialogue. I didn't like the fact that we'd start a comic with the Joker, and by the time we inked it, he would have turned into the Scarecrow.
Particularly in my early days, I did very little rewriting.
The only kind of writing is rewriting.
Once you start rewriting, you're not able to stop. With each draft the fundamental banality and worthlessness of the material becomes more evident even as its vitality and spontaneity are drained from it.
