John Mayer on Finishing Awful Songs

...and sometimes that song of yours that you think is so awful turns out to be a chart-topper:<p><i>The thing about 'Sweet Child o mine,' it was written in five minutes. It was one of those songs, only three chords. You know that guitar lick Slash does at the beginning? It was kinda like a joke because we thought, 'What is this song? It's gonna be nothing, it'll be filler on the record.' And except that vocal-wise, it's very sweet and sincere, Slash was just messing around when he first wrote that lick.</i><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_child_of_mine" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_child_of_mine</a>

Judging by the number of uncompleted projects littering my hard-drive, this idea obviously has a wider application.<p>I think Mayer's real point is that, unless you finish something, you don't gain the benefit of the experience of completing something, and you can never get to a point where you can judge your results.<p>In my case, I've switched to using git which encourages me to make lots of small commits, and I'm really making an effort to 'push the big boulders up the hill', just a little at a time. I just have to finish more apps, both because I need the experience, and I need to improve.<p>You might write shit code, or you might write great code, but unless you finish, your work isn't going anywhere.

This article described my exact experience with writing songs. In the end, you wind up with a bunch of half-baked, fragmented ideas that don't fit together into a cohesive whole. Music, like programming, is meticulous, but also mysterious in the way that sudden inspiration can light a fire under you. When inspiration fails, however, we have to soldier on and get the work done, all in the name of self-improvement.

Another way to look at it is that "You have to perservere so that your execution catches up with your taste."<p>I read a blog post explaining that this is the reason you dont see great writers who have a Masters or higher in literature. Their taste is so refined that when they read their own attempts at writing they get very discouraged and give up.<p>Hmmm now I have to go finish off my crappy app.

Or: real artists ship.<p><a href="http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Real_Artists_Ship.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Real_Artists_Ship...</a>

When you get to Mayer's level, you don't have to finish your songs- you have people, experienced writers who do it for you. Dirty secret of the trade.

In art it is entirely personal whether you finish "awful" songs. You really think Rilke would have been better off finishing every poem he started writing? Nonsense. If you have a Muse, better obey her.<p>When it comes to software: perhaps you ought to give things more thought before you begin?

Mayer's quote is a garbled mess to me.

Then there's Flaubert who took friends' advice to throw a novel into the fire and start over.