Last night I was reading through the lyrics booklet of Bon Iver’s new record (great record, but why oh why did he print his lyrics?), and I fell asleep on my folded up futon in an awkward position.

As I slept, one of the loudest rolls of thunder I’d ever heard cracked above me, and commandeered my dreams.

I dreamed about the relationship we equate between lightning and inspiration. Suddenly, that metaphorical affinity that I’d always given the two was broken, and it seemed ridiculous that they should ever be linked. All lightning does is flash and burn, and scare. Surely rain, which facilitates growth and life, should get the credit. But rain is more effective, and much less destructive, when it comes in steady, regular, melancholic bouts.

This week I’m going to see my old buddy Michael for the first time in a couple of years. I remember when I lived with him (in a forested valley with a river at the end of our backyard - oh Dunedin) he was working on songs for his Brown project. Every night he would be in his room, recording and re-recording new backing vocals. He must have made a dozen versions of every song. At the time I couldn’t understand why he kept going back to the same material. My approach then was to pay somebody to record my band, do it in two days with minimal demoing, and once it was done, it was done, and I would never touch it again, for fear of losing the ‘magic’ of the recording.

But now I realise that Michael had a maturity I was lacking. While it’s definitely possible to overdo editing, it takes real mental strength to be able take apart our creations and put them back together. It gives us the chance to learn much more from one song than if we run out and get drunk as soon as it feels done.

I was writing songs myself at the time, but it was almost like they had a self destruct function on a timer. I would get an idea, get excited and work hard on the song for a couple of days. But after that, I would stop work. If I had a finished, beautiful song at that point, I would take it to the band. But if the song had hit a wall, or if it was finished but didn’t sound right, I would abandon it, and couldn’t bear to look at the thing again. As you can imagine, I wasn’t finishing a lot of songs.

Editing ourselves, especially repeated times, is a way of challenging our inspiration. Because of this, it’s terrifying. Whenever someone I trusted pointed out a flaw in one of my songs, I never tried to fix it. Instead I threw the song out, and thought - ‘well, maybe next time I’ll make a song that’s closer to perfect.’ I never got the chance to understand where I’d gone wrong, or stumble on a surprising solution that might get me excited about the song again.

I think the problem was my desire to be finished. Until recently I thought of my songs in two ways - finished, and unfinished. Finished songs were the most prized possession I could own. My favourite thing to do would be to write a little list on paper of my finished songs, and imagine album track lists with them.

Unfinished songs on the other hand, were completely worthless. At best, they were on their way to the ultimate goal of being finished, but most were miscarriages, failures, which not only had no value, but even had a negative value - they made me doubt my abilities.

I realise now why it was impossible for me to edit a song I thought of as ‘finished.’ I had placed so much of my self esteem into those songs that challenging them would be challenging my own self belief. Songs that I hadn’t finished fast enough to feel ‘inspired,’ and finished songs with flaws had to be thrown out, because they had failed. They threatened what I saw as my only value as a writer - my ability to make strong, finished works.

I’m getting to the age now where a lot of my friends have gardens (not me, I’m all for gardening, but I want someone else to do it and and I’ll cook the food). Nowadays I try to think of a song as a bean plant. It starts with an idea - a seed put in the ground and watered, a text document opened and stared at. And at that point, the thing is alive. As time passes and I continue to open and edit the song, it grows a stem, branches, and eventually it matures and grows beans. That’s the point where I would have called it finished in the past. But now, I can think of the song having a value, having a life, throughout the entire process.

Even once a song does mature, it isn’t done - those beans fall off and it starts a new cycle. Lately I’ve been allowing myself to see live sets as ways to continue the writing process - even on old songs that I had previously thought of as cast in stone (for better or worse).

I used to blab about process art in art history papers, but clearly I never got it. I now understand that satisfaction comes from the act of writing, not the finished song itself. If I allow myself to think of a song as ‘finished’ - my satisfaction only lasts a second. My very next thought is ‘bet you can’t finish another one,’ and then the self doubt creeps back in.

By valuing the whole process, I can enjoy the whole process. And because I’m not in a desperate rush to get to the end, I can write a better song.

Here in subtropical Auckland, you get lightning a dozen times each winter. In Dunedin at the 45th parallel, it’s much rarer than that. But in both places there is regular rain. In Auckland, it’s chubby and warm, in Dunedin, it’s drizzle that feels like tiny needles. And as much as rain is boring and depressing, it’s usually conducive to getting something done. Great creativity is often made for and inspired by the rare, dramatic and destructive moments, but without rainy days, and repetitive, rhythmic, boring work, it would all be flash in the pan stuff.