Writers, sculptors, coders, and musicians

This morning, as I was having my coffee, I’ve read a Medium article about the process of writing that one of my colleagues at the EPFL Extension School linked to. Here’s the full article by Anupam Krishnamurthy: Separate your writing from your editing. Cool stuff. If you are engaging in any kind of creative endeavor, read it.

There’s a point made about writers working like sculptors in the sense that you start with a block and refine it until the piece is completed. Here’s an excerpt (emphasis mine):

A sculptor visualizes a statue within a block of marble, and chips away to reveal it. She does so in iterations of the whole statue, rather than focusing and refining one part before moving to another. In her first iteration, she carves out the rough dimensions of the statue itself, from head to toe. In the second one, she outlines some details such as the face, the limbs and the torso. In the third pass, specific features such as the eyes, nose and the fingers start to appear. Later, she adds the finishing touches such as fingernails, eyebrows and curls of the tunic.

Still sipping my coffee, I thought that this is exactly how I approach everything that I do. From writing code to composing music and I felt like sharing how I approach this by using a musical context. I’m a big fan of analogies as I believe it is a great vector to convey a concept by using familiar elements.

So, here is my composing process that utilizes these exact same 4 steps.

First iteration: Blocks

Just as the sculptor example, if I’m writing a general theme, I start with blocks (I do it differently when I have to write a motif for a character but that is another article for another day). In this case, the blocks are chords. They are even called block chords. At this point, I don’t even know if I’m going for a heavy metal song or a slow cinematic underscore. Let’s not focus on the details, let’s just get these slabs of stone in place.

This is how it looks like in my editor using MIDI notation: