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Understanding your own composing process

Have you ever put together, or watched someone else put together, a thousand-piece puzzle? Approaches for completing a puzzle vary. Some people start methodically with the border. Others start with a key image in the center of the puzzle and work outward. Still others work randomly, fitting together islands of puzzle pieces here and there and eventually joining them. There’s no right way; it’s just a matter of figuring out what method works for each puzzle and for the person putting it together.

Composers, too, have their own preferred ways of working, so it’s important to think flexibly about the composing process. Sometimes you’ll see the composing process presented in a fairly linear way, like this:

Brainstorm
Plan
Research
Compose
Revise

Those basic steps find their way into most projects, and the process usually begins with brainstorming and ends with revision, but composers usually take each step more than once and at several times throughout the process. Consider student composer Marisa Williamson’s project: a video essay.

In talking with other people in her class and with friends, Williamson found that all of them had seen iconic footage and pictures from earlier tragic events that she was planning to feature in her essay, but few could remember key words spoken about the events or by those involved in the events.

Based on what she knew about her audience, Williamson decided—with rough ideas about her purpose and how to proceed—to knit video clips, still images, audio files, and her own narration together to make an argument that would appeal to her peers. She used a video-editing application that allowed her to combine, sequence, and edit all the materials she had gathered and also to layer in text and titles.

A linear rendering of Williamson’s composing process might look something like this:

Brainstorm about purpose and audience
Gather images and video
Choose songs
Write and record narration
Input images, audio, video, and narration
Add text
Produce video

Linear representation of a composing process

This is a fairly neat and orderly way of visualizing the elements that are part of a writing process, and certainly these are important steps in the writing process. The way Williamson compiled, wrote, and thought through the different elements of her composition, however, might actually be better and more accurately represented visually as a series of loops in which she revisited stages and elements of her composition.

Realistic representation of a composing process

Williamson began by gathering and watching different videos. She then selected some still images, collected some songs, and scripted her narration. Each of these pieces affected her thoughts about and presentation of the others. She went back to the video to edit it and to trim pieces, add to other pieces, and sequence clips together.

She worked with the music, trimming and editing and deciding how to layer it under her narration and on top of the video and images. She found different audio clips and replaced or changed the audio in the project.

She did this over and over again, while she also continued to write and edit her script to reflect changes in the sequence of video pieces and images. What was essential for Williamson was budgeting enough time for the shaping and thinking and reshaping and rethinking.

Williamson, “To the Children of America” (video essay project)