This morning’s listening? Beethoven. Why not?

That reminds me… I had a discussion with an artist once about Beethoven vs Mozart and it brough them a lot of comfort. So maybe I should thread that here...

A lot of creative folks assume that their work should flow like Mozart.

That is, they come up with an idea, and the work just flows out, mostly in a nearly finished form. And then they do some minor cleanup, and the work is done.

It’s been over-told and glorified, but that’s a lot how Mozart worked. Very quickly with minimal sketching of ideas.

People get depressed when they get stuck trying to “fix” things.

This really frustrates when your ability to mentally imagine the final work conflicts with reality.

You’ve been taught that this is how creativity works. And you start to think you are broken. You can’t imagine things correctly, and are having to adjust it once in reality.

This can really bother people. Talk about imposter syndrome getting fed fuel here.

How do you tell someone you had to redraw that arm 23 times before it “worked enough” to be ok? You’re ashamed at not being a good artist.

Now let me tell you about Beethoven. Because he did us a wonderful thing. Having the monstrous ego that he did, he saved EVERYTHING. I mean… every scrap of paper he touched, he saved. And people kept it and cataloged it.

From that, we have all of his workbooks. On all of his music.

And I can tell you one thing: composing was not easy for Beethoven. We have thousands of pages of him musically “redrawing that fucking arm until it looks right."

It’s how he worked actually. One teacher called him a “motific” composer. That he would take a simple set of motifs, a few notes, and do dozens if not hundreds of variations on them until he found something that worked.

Expand that out larger. This is how he worked: every single choice, every single method he would erase-and-redraw. He would slowly build up from these little pieces, changing and feeling every step of the way until it finally looked right to him.

And I do mean “finally” .. some of the big works would take him months to finish.

So what does this mean?

Do you find yourself drawing and re-drawing and re-drawing until you finally get it right?

No. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you. This is how your creative process works. You explore as you work. This is you. AND IT’S OK.

You’re a Beethoven. Not a Mozart.

Don’t beat yourself up for it.

You’re awesome. And you do what works for you.

/fin