Making Poetry Pop: Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys on the Writing Process
One of the most unfortunate misconceptions about writing is that it's easy for people who are "real writers," and struggling with the process means you must just lack the gift. The fact is that most writing is challenging for most people most of the time. Translating our thoughts and feelings into words is an infinitely complex process, a combination of emotional and cognitive effort that no one fully understands and none of us fully control. The struggle is the process; when you're circling over a line again and again, frustrated that you've gotten stuck and starting to panic that the right words will never come, that's writing. You're a writer.
Knowing that hugely successful, brilliant writers wrestle with how to get their message out helps demystify their accomplishments, and a recent New York Magazine interview with songwriter Alex Turner gives some great insight into just how unpredictable the writing process is for everyone. Frontman for the British pop band Arctic Monkeys, Turner has been writing songs since he was a teenager. In 2013, the band's breakout album A.M. brought international attention to his unique lyrical style - witty, dense, and expressive, the album showcased Turner's extraordinary ability to be playful and poignant at the same time. In Arctic Monkeys' new release, Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino, his writing is darker, more wry, but as carefully observed as ever.
Asked "how he does it," Turner paints a picture of a highly sensitive process that moves with its own mysterious, even bizarre logic. Like most people who've felt that conditions need to be just-so before the words will flow, Turner explains that he usually writes first thing in the morning or late at night, almost always writes alone, and has noticed that his surroundings make a definite impact on what comes out (he doesn't usually like what he produces when he writes near water, for example, and saw a difference when he wrote for the first time in an apartment that wasn't on the ground floor). Most importantly, Turner shares that getting his lyrics to their final public state takes intense effort. He writes down ideas, returns to develop them, uses placeholder language to work out the rhythm and flow of lines, and refines the writing again and again. Far from being some instantaneous gift of inspiration, most of these works take work. So much so that part of the challenge is knowing when to stop. Turner admits that it's only gotten harder over time to bring the rewriting process to an end, and he relies on trusted people around him to intervene when his tinkering's gone on too long.
Hearing about the idiosyncrasies, the messiness, the anxieties that accomplished writers manage reminds us that communication is difficult for everyone. It's part of the human condition to want to express ourselves and to struggle with how to do that in the most satisfying, effective way. We all have moments when the right words are just waiting for us, but most of the time our ideas come in fragments and we must work patiently to shape them into a coherent whole. It's easy to forget that good writing takes work, whether it's a perfect bit of wordplay in a song lyric or an incisive argument in a legal brief, because the mental labor of writing is often solitary and invisible. But it's no less demanding, and no less necessary, for that.
For every story that comes to us whole, ready for the world, there are hundreds of stories that peek up inside us and have to be coaxed out. Sometimes we can only unearth them first thing in the morning, in a ground floor apartment, far from any bodies of water; and once we've got them in hand, it can take hours of careful polishing to turn them into something that other people will be able to appreciate. If we get exhausted or frustrated partway through, that just means we're doing the work to end up with something special. In writing, perseverance pays off.
If you're struggling, you care; and that means you're doing it right.