Rolling Music Writers' Thread

Usually when there's an article/review that I realize I DON'T want to do, I clear my schedule, chug a coffee, sign off AIM and try to burn through it and put it behind me... Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't

I can't drink coffee most of the time--it really screws my nervous system up--but yesterday and the day before I'd gotten so little sleep I had to resort to it or else pass out mid-afternoon. (Up late trying to finish w/no luck, get up early a.m. to try again.) It helped with bursts of plow-through-it, which is usually enough; once I get a bead on something it can be pretty easy to follow through to the end. Not this time.

A lot of times I'll work on other, smaller stuff as a break from whatever's giving me trouble, and I got a few things done I needed to, so that's been nice. But this is pretty ill-timed: I have more assignments right now that I have in a while, which is a relief, or would be if this roadblock weren't in the way.

i don't think i've ever met a writer who doesn't leave the writing until the last possible minute. i know i need the deadline to focus my thoughts, whether its a 150 word album review, or a 160,000 word book.

Ever since I went fulltime freelance that shit ended fast. Now I just bang out shit as fast as possible in hopes of having time to pitch more stuff..

Yeah, fuck that hanging around waiting on the muse bullshit. This is work. Get it done, and start the next thing.

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i need the deadline to focus my thoughts, whether its a 150 word album review, or a 160,000 word book.

a 160,000 word book? jesus that's 600 pages! i couldn't even review a 600 page book at the last minute.

xp Yeah, I've never comprehended the wait until the last minute thing. That'd drive me into the crazy house to work that way (and as an editor, writers working that way drove me even more nuts, usually because they tended to go way past the last minute.)

Actually, that's the reason editors work up fake deadlines, without telling writers they're fake.

have recently returned to freelancing after a few yrs off, and have recently clued in that my longest-term editor has been feeding me fake deadlines for a few months. But I have been actually meeting them, so I'm not going to tell him I'm hip.
what xhuxk said "I came up covering zoning boards and sewage commissions, where objective detachment is strived for", likewise (sorta). Objective detachment is practically a survival technique in that environment.
Also, writing mostly in a newsy-style, record reviews used to be great no-one's-looking chances to play around with different writing ideas/styles/whatevers. Y'know, 150-300 wds once a week with which to play.

Actually, that's the reason editors work up fake deadlines, without telling writers they're fake.

i've been on both sides of this equation. found that fake deadline usually don't work from either direction. writers can sense where the real deadline is. but it does help focus the mind.

(i think of it as sort like keeping my clock 10 or 15 minutes fast. i know it's not the real time, but it still reminds me that the real time is coming up soon.)

probably biggest part of my hitting deadlines is less editor faking me out, more maturity/concerted effort

a 160,000 word book? jesus that's 600 pages! i couldn't even review a 600 page book at the last minute.

by the last minute, i mean of course the last month or two of an 18 month project! though last time i had loads of interview sources holding out on me and meaning i *couldn't get started any earlier...

Yeah, fuck that hanging around waiting on the muse bullshit. This is work. Get it done, and start the next thing.

this is so much easier said than done. i wish i could be one of those writers who could just sit down and bang words out, but...no :(

yeah... i'm not revelling in my slothfulness, i wish i could be more 'professional' too - but have been full time freelance for eleven or so years now, and this is just the way i work, so.

BTW, who said anything about waiting for the muse until Phil brought it up?

I'm just not the type to wait until the last minute. Depending the length of the piece, I'll usually have started three days to a week before, in large part because I allow myself time for revision. The number of assignments I'm working at once is another factor.

Music writing shouldn't be about crimping the stuff out but it is for a lot of people and you can always tell. That said ^^ it is a job; so if I get stuck on one thing I move immediately to something else. So if I've always got a list of ten or more things to be writing there's no need to stop.

It was hard to train myself to stop downing tools the second I couldn't think of anything to say about Marillion. Just move on to something else; it's not an open invitation to have half an E and play guitar hero for the rest of the afternoon.

What Alfred said actually made me curious about how other people handle revising their own work, before sending it in. Give or take certain haiku-length reviews for Rhapsody or wherever, or if I have very very very tight deadline (which I usually find ways to avoid) I almost never file copy the day I finish it. I generally prefer to sleep on it overnight -- or, for longer pieces, maybe over a weekend -- before making final tweaks/overhauls/ massages to it and sending it in (which tends to be the first thing I concentrate on the next morning, before moving on to other work). How common is that? I honestly have no idea how others handle this. (As an editor, though, I got the impression that certain writers even more neurotic than myself had a tendency to worry and overthink pieces into oblivion and missed deadlines. I really hated that.)

yeah, i always, always, always finish at least one day before; sleep on it; look at it with new eyes; revise and turn in.

writing a bi-weekly record review column in the early 90s I established a pattern of waking up around 5:00 AM on deadline day and pulling together all my rough drafts and notes into finished copy and sending it off by early afternoon. otherwise I tried to follow xhuxk's method of sleeping on a finished piece and doing some revisions/tweaking on deadline day. of course this often didn't happen and I rushed to finish at the last minute.

the last few years I've been reviewing books (non-fiction/not on music) and for me it's a completely different process, more time-consuming and labor intensive, perhaps because I'm less experienced in this arena. i need to finish a 1000 word book piece days before deadline and do several rounds of revision/tweaking before sending it off.

by the last minute, i mean of course the last month or two of an 18 month project! though last time i had loads of interview sources holding out on me and meaning i *couldn't get started any earlier...

i think this must varies w/the type of book you're writing and I certainly didn't mean to cast aspersions on yr work habits. clearly it worked for you!
and yeah, for a reported book you are at the mercy of your subjects to some extent and as we all know, looming deadlines are merciless.

sometimes i work way ahead of schedule, sometimes right on it, occasionally a little behind. usually my secret blessing is if i know i'm going to be busy or not home much in the coming days, and get a lot of stuff done early and then have time to actually go over and revise and nitpick a few times, which is a luxury i don't give myself a lot anymore.

of course, my schedule is also a product of what and where i write -- sometimes i do concert reviews and movie reviews where i have a window of a couple days to write after seeing the subject, so it's not like i can do those early eithert way. and sometimes if i have a big piece on my plate but don't feel ready to give it the concentration it needs, i'll knock out a couple short blog posts instead.

Almost all of my gig reviews have a deadline of 6:00 am the following morning, so I have to write them as soon as I get home. As a natural procrastinator, I find this concentrates the mind wonderfully. (It also means that none of them are written stone cold sober, but I found my optimum level of consumption quite early on.)

yeah, i used to do gig reviews for a daily paper, with a 3am the next morning deadline, which i actually really loved - it focused my mind, and meant i didn't have any 'homework' hanging over me.

otherwise, though, i think i spend the time between 'finishing' a piece of work and the deadline just honing and fiddling with every detail. i had a relatively quiet week last week, and spent five straight days polishing every line of a 1000 word blog piece for MOJO - but i was aiming for being 'funny', which i don't do terribly often, and whcih, for me, is always a matter of swapping a dozen possible jokes in and out of every line.

xp Actually, that raises another question. Somebody just mentioned to me last month that they write for a publication where the policy is that critics are not allowed to consume alcohol at the concerts they're covering. There's some logic to that rule, I guess, but I'd honestly never heard of it before. (And it's hard to think of a show I've been to, including ones I've reviewed, where beer was available that I haven't had some. Also, since it's likely that most people don't watch shows entirely sober, I'm wondering whether not drinking might unfairly skew opinions about the music.) Anyway, I wonder how rare this policy is.

can someone email maura@idolator dot com and tell her what publication that is?

Wow, that's unimaginably harsh! For me, the right amount of booze helps rather than hinders the review - easing me over the initial hump, so that the words start flowing more freely. My regular intake: two pints of ordinary lager. Not a drop more, not a drop less. I've become quite superstitious about it.

There's been one recent change, which for me has worked out very well: about a year ago, my newspaper lifted the word count restriction for the web versions of gig reviews, retaining it just for the print versions. So we're now asked to "write freely" for the web version, and to submit an edited print version at the same time. This has improved my whole attitude to the editing process.

the number of offices i've worked in where intoxicants much stronger than alcohol seemed to fuel the entire production team...

Somebody just mentioned to me last month that they write for a publication where the policy is that critics are not allowed to consume alcohol at the concerts they're covering.

I would think sports writers would find the idea of such a 'restriction' hysterical.

And how does one enforce it, other than having a snitch who know what you look like and is near you at the show?

Now I'm curious. The name of the pub needs publishing so that we can be supercilious with those willing to work for a fifteen dollar or less review and be teetotal.

Let's just say it's a daily in Texas. Don't want to get any more specific than that without actually verifying the rule first-hand -- sounds really far-fetched to me, and I'm still kind of incredulous.

And yeah, apparently the theory is, if you drink at a show, a friend of your boss's might see you there.

Let's just say it's a daily in Texas.

Now you know -- in Texas (!?), of all places -- that is just wrong and anti-'Mercan. How would anyone survive during college football season?

concert reviewing: the last bastion of socially accepted drinking on the job (bartending excluded)?

I don't drink, so I get a few editors assigning me for festival coverage because they like how I have the energy to stay on my feet and watch bands for 10 hrs at a time

I don't drink either, and I find it can occasionally make concert reviewing difficult, because most acts don't have a solid 75 minutes in 'em, frankly, so by around a half hour into the headliner's set I'm usually thinking, "get me the fuck out of here already," and maybe if I was slightly drunk I wouldn't feel that way.

Nah, you'd feel that way anyway. Or at least I probably would. But then, that's part of why I've never done many live reviews.

Actually, one of the few times I got chewed out by my bosses in my decade at the Voice was when a writer said in a Sound Of The City review that they'd left the show they were reviewing before the encore. Seemed like a valid response to me, if the band was sucking, but my bosses thought otherwise.

what if you bailed early from one of those zoning-board meetings you covered as a cub reporter? what if something HAPPENS during the encore. doesn't a reviewer have some responsibility toward the readers or is all about yr vaunted tastes & opinions.

at least r. meltzer making things up in a concert review represents some attempt at, you know, being entertaining. writing that you left a show early because the band sucked is pretty fucking arrogant IMO. yr bosses were correct.

It depends on the show. I walked out of an Eagles concert I reviewed in 2003 when the band showed no inclination to stop playing after two encores and three hours.

meanwhile every Pearl Jam concert I've attended has pulled out some weird, unexpected shit in the last third (the first time I reviewed them though was when Sleater Kinney opened for them).

Well, I'm not really saying my bosses were wrong, in retrospect. Just saying what my thoughts had been when reading/editing the review (in which the leaving-of-show was entertaining, until I got called out on it.) (For what it's worth, I've never personally left a concert I was reviewing before it was done, no matter how much I hated it. And I'm pretty sure I've never reviewed an album for publication that I hadn't actually listened to all the way through -- though there's a Nirvana album in my metal book I didn't have a copy of on hand when I wrote the review. But I've definitely written show previews of bands based on just a few songs.)

didn't mean to come off like moses up there. an embarrassing number of albums i reviewed in the old RS record guide got only a cursory listen or two. a classic case of biting more than you can chew. previews or listings are exempt from review standards.

I've walked out early from two shows that I've reviewed (from a total of around 150), because a) I already had all the information I needed and b) I couldn't stand to be there a second longer. One was Seasick Steve, and the other was (to my surprise) Manu Chao.

you have to be some sort of wizard to get me to read a review of a live show. so, hats off to the people who have to write them. (i can think of maybe one in the last decade that was actually memorable. greg tate's springsteen show thing in the voice.)

(but then my gold standard might actually be bukowski's stones review in creem: http://beatpatrol.wordpress.com/2009/07/28/charles-bukowski-jaggernaut-wild-horse-on-a-plastic-phallus-1975/)

i always stay till the end of a show. what if someone died?? also, i like concerts.

Well, there must be daily papers that still, at least on occasion, run reviews the morning after certain "important" shows, right? Which might well mean pages close early enough to require reviewers to file before shows end. (The dailies I read most seem to stick to the two-or-even-three-days-after rule, but I get the idea that that's a convention that's evolved over time. I could be way off on that, though; never tracked it very closely.)

And Scott is right -- of all the kinds of music criticism, live reviews are probably the most boring to read, and almost definitely the most boring to write (and to edit, which is why I delegated Sound of the City to sub-editors when they were available.)