John Steinbeck wasn’t a songwriter, but he knew something about creativity that every songwriter eventually bumps into: the moment you start editing too early, the whole thing can fall apart.
He once wrote…
“Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down… Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.”
That line might as well be a neon sign for songwriters.
The Two Minds You Write With
When you sit down to write, you’ve actually got two different “brains” vying for control.
There’s the instinctive one, the part that blurts out surprising phrases, odd images, and bits of melody without warning. This is the part that actually writes songs.
Then there’s the editor. The tidy one. The one who loves smoothing things out and fixing tiny details. The editor isn’t bad, but it’s terrible at writing first drafts. Put it in charge too early and everything slows to a crawl. You lose momentum. You forget what you were chasing.
That’s what Steinbeck was warning about.
Songwriting Flow Doesn’t Survive Constant Interruption
A song draft is a fragile creature. In the early stages, it’s usually held together by a feeling rather than logic. If you stop every two lines to polish a rhyme or tweak a syllable count, you jolt yourself out of that feeling. You break the rhythm your brain is trying to form.
And once the rhythm breaks, so does the connection to the deeper well where your best ideas come from.
Think of it this way: writing a first draft is like following a faint melody from another room. If you stop to rearrange the furniture every time you hear a new bar, the melody gets away.
Writing Fast Isn’t Sloppy… It’s Strategic
Fast writing isn’t about lowering your standards. It’s about giving yourself permission to get the whole idea out before your internal critic wakes up.
When you write quickly:
- You outrun your self-doubt.
- You gather more raw material than you’d ever produce by fussing line-by-line.
- You stay emotionally connected to the seed of the song.
- You capture thoughts and images that would’ve vanished if you stopped to “fix” something.
It’s not chaos. It’s drafting. It’s discovering the shape of the song before you start carving it.
The Editing Comes Later
Once the draft exists (no matter how rough) you suddenly have something to work with. The editor brain becomes useful again. You can tighten the rhyme scheme, reshape the chorus, or swap weak lines for stronger ones.
But now you’re sculpting from clay rather than trying to sculpt from thin air.
Editing a complete draft is faster, cleaner, and far more effective than editing as you go. And it’s much less emotionally draining.
The Real Danger of Early Editing
Most unfinished songs don’t die because the idea was bad. They die because the songwriter kept rewriting the first verse without ever reaching the second.
Steinbeck saw this in other writers, but songwriters fall into the same trap: polishing a fragment instead of finishing the thought. That habit kills more songs than “writer’s block” ever could.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Here’s a simple experiment…
Next time you sit down to write, commit to spilling the entire song idea (verses, chorus, bridge, even the parts you’re unsure about) straight onto the page without pausing.
Let the lines be messy. Let the rhymes be wrong. Let the imagery wander.
You’ll probably be surprised by:
- how much you write,
- how many ideas appear out of nowhere,
- and how quickly the emotional heart of the song shows itself.
Then, once it’s all down, you can switch gears and start shaping it into something solid.
Songwriting Thrives on Momentum
Steinbeck’s advice is really an invitation to trust yourself. Trust that the good ideas will show up if you give them room. Trust that the editor will clean things up later. Trust that writing fast doesn’t mean writing poorly, it just means writing freely.
Songwriting isn’t just craft. It’s discovery. And discovery requires movement.
When you stop interrupting yourself, the song has a chance to reveal what it wants to be. And that’s when the magic tends to happen.
