I’ve just returned from a (song)writing retreat in the Adirondacks, with mosquito bites, sore muscles from climbing many mountains, a slightly injured wrist from a small tumble, and drafts of two and a half songs. This is the same retreat I did last year, run by Nerissa Nields, with a couple (but only a couple) of the same participants. There are many things I could say about the retreat, but for now I want to write about the second song I drafted. On the first day of the retreat I’d finished a draft of the song I arrived wanting to write, and found myself facing two writing sessions in the day (at the end of which I would be asked to share what I’d written) without the slightest clue what to write about. Before each writing session Nerissa reads a prompt but although occasionally a word or two from the prompt has found its way in to what I write, I’ve never really written from the prompt. And the prompts aren’t like the “assignments” that I embrace, both because they’re not mandatory, and because they’re really not instructions; they’re just small poems or passages to get us thinking. This prompt was an e.e. cummings poem, that I only scribbled down parts of . . . but seemed to be about being open to trying things without fear of being wrong. So I started out with a (one-line) refrain “She’s not afraid to fall” and built some verses around that (some of them coming from other words or phrases in the poem), based on couplets describing the person the song was about who isn’t afraid to fall, and all that she could accomplish because that fear was out of the way. When it came time for me to share, people had positive things to say about the song, but I didn’t think it worked, and was considering discarding it. The positive comments aren’t necessarily indicative – the rules of the retreat are that you only give positive comments (something I’ve had to get used to since that’s not how songwriting critique sessions I’d previously participated in worked). The feedback can still be useful – you can often tell by the kind of things people point to whether the song/writing worked or not (and certainly you can tell which pieces people liked best). But the mere fact that people found things to praise in it doesn’t meant that it was a song worth keeping, and I was pretty certain I wouldn’t bother to revise it. One of the writers whose writing and critique I most liked told me on the third day that she and some others had been talking about that song the night before and couldn’t figure out why I didn’t think it was worth keeping. Okay, so a more serious vote of confidence for the song. But that didn’t mean I thought it had anything in it worth saving. But then she asked an important question: what was it that I didn’t like about the song? Her question made me conceptualize my concerns, which were that the person I was writing about in the song didn’t feel like a real person. I’d written a bunch of interesting descriptors of a person, either inspired by the prompt or by other observations I’d been keeping track of in my songwriting notebooks and put them together in rhyming couplets with a cool melody into verses. But not only did they seem somewhat randomly put together, but they didn’t seem to describe someone who could be a real person – some of them even seemed to work at cross-purposes. Formulating that objection to the song was a real insight, because it told me what I needed to do if I wanted to rescue it. And then the long hike I did the following morning when I was leaving clarified it further: in a way, I’m describing someone who is not like me. For those of you who have read the Salon piece dividing the world into chaos muppets and order muppets (and for those of you who haven’t – do!), I am the quintessential order muppet – I need to have an exit strategy for everything. Here I was on the mountain, making sure I saved a little bit of the water in case we needed it for something, bringing a granola bar and a long-sleeved shirt even though it didn’t seem likely either of those would be necessary but if something went wrong I’d be glad to have them . . . that’s my strategy in life. And while it has some advantages, the person in the song just trusts that everything will work out, and so it does. I even considered, on that hike, putting myself subtly into the song. There was a line something like “she’s climbing trees and mountains while others learn to crawl, ‘cause she’s not afraid to fall” and I’m considering changing that to “while I still learn to crawl.” And suddenly I can see a way to write this song. It suggests that some of my creative lines might have to go (I had one about her fixing Dylan’s grammar), because they’re actually more about what someone like me would do than someone like this more fully-realized person I’m imagining would do. So there’s a lot of work to do if I want to keep the song and make it work. But figuring out how to do it, which was inspired by that insightful question about what wasn’t working about it for me, is the most important step.