I have often had the pleasure and the privilege of working with a good friend of mine, Josh Sood. We have worked in collaborative process to create musicals and albums – stories told through song – with he as the music composer and myself as lyric writer. This means that I end up writing most of the stories that we’re telling through songs.

One thing Josh and I agree on is that certain things when creating are inevitable. He often talks about his compositions in these terms – “It has to go here,” he would say, moving his fingers across his keyboard to make a very pleasing sound.

My way of expressing the same thing is slightly different – when a tricky lyric doesn’t fit, for instance, I go through a whole list of things the replacement “can’t” be, because it doesn’t make sense for the character to say that particular phrase, or because it loses the desired meaning that was tied up in the semiotics of whatever word has to be replaced.

This has led me to think about the act of writing from a very different angle.

Josh is very much of the school of thought that the story should come before the music. I agree with him; having done it the other way around, it’s often the much more organic way to write a truly symbiotic piece, where the words and the music work together to tell the same story. Story, then music, then reactive story re-write. Many people have spoken about this, in fields so wide it might surprise you: Neil Druckmann, creative director on Naughty Dog’s video game The Last of Us, said[1] that their concept of where the story of the game would go changed when they first heard Gustavo Santaolalla’s musical ideas for the game. The story and music became reactive and symbiotic with one another.

But Santaolalla’s music wouldn’t have struck such a chord[2] if he didn’t already have something to react to himself. Coming back to musical theatre, Stephen Sondheim has stated[3] that he doesn’t get started on writing the music until the words are finished. Further to this, Sondheim states awe that a writer can create out of nothing a story, script or set of lyrics without something to react to – the proverbial “First Cause” or “First Actor”[4] in the symbiotic relationship.

This is where I disagree with the model.

Nothing anyone can create can convey the entirety of Creation – the closest we can ever hope to get is to create something very small in detail and invite the audient to make their own extrapolations. There is so much in even our world alone, in this one time that we live in, that it might as well be infinity[5]. No human alive today will see, know or experience everything. Very few people alive today will even visit half of all the countries in the world. In the same way, even mammoth projects such as Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, comic book continuities or J K Rowling’s ongoing Harry Potter universe will even scratch the surface of everything in those worlds.

That’s fine. In fact, it’s necessary. Most stories left untapped in the world are not written because they are quite boring. Unless “quite boring” is what you’re going for[6] then you should focus on something else. This here’s my point: creation is not a conjuring trick out of nothing.

Writing a story is not a creative act. It’s a destructive act. You cut away huge chunks of infinity to focus down on the things you want to show people. Any and every thing that is written could have been about any and every thing else. You take an infinity of possibility and you start to impose boundaries on it, you focus it down to what’s important. No story can be about the whole world or universe.[7] I find this to be an incredibly comforting way of looking at a blank page.

If you sit down to create and you don’t know how, ask yourself what you need to do is about. What does it need? What will it do? You’re unlikely to have no answer, and that’s a start. If you know your main character is a contemporary woman, for instance, you’ve already cut away huge swathes of infinity. Even if you don’t know what country she’s in, you know she’s on Earth, and you know she isn’t half the population on Earth. Start with these important things, and build from there.

If you feel your story is “missing something”, it’s not a failure, and it’s not that you have created something mediocre. You’ve just missed something inevitable in your telling of the story. The answer was probably there all along, you just accidentally focussed it out of the picture. Go back and put it back in.

So next time you’re intimidated by the possibilities of a blank page, tell yourself what you know about the work, then step by step, keep focusing and refining infinity.

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[1] In a documentary featurette that shipped with the game, which I believe is accessible on YouTube.

[2] Pun wholeheartedly intended.

[3] Many places, including his book Finishing the Hat, as well as in an interview to accompany the concert in celebration of his 80th birthday, accessible on YouTube.

[4] Cf. the Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God.

[5] Which is to say, I know it’s actually finite, forgive the metaphysics here.

[6] Which, let’s be honest, it could well be.

[7] Again, without extrapolation on behalf of the reader or audient.