5 ms·

Read over your code, and wherever you meet with a section which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

• yesenadam 5y ago
  This is a paraphrase of Samuel Johnson's "Read over your compositions and, wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” I learnt the truth in this when I spent years writing orchestral music. I think it's very similar to avoiding premature optimization. Each piece would take months, first sketching in the broad features - melody, harmony in a few voices, gradually adding more until I reached what seemed the end, then revising until no improvements came to mind on listening through, and lastly adding the large-scale dynamics, pauses, tempo changes, percussion. I learnt to always write/add just what I heard in my head, to try whatever it occurred to me to try, keep whatever changes sounded better, but never to plan anything. Sometimes, early on, a particularly nice bit would emerge fairly fully formed, of which I was proud, and I'd polish that moment immediately to a near-complete state. But then for months it was fixed, couldn't flex and evolve with the rest of the piece, being already "perfect"—or it was originally, not in its final context—and usually I'd regret it was there, all dead and shiny. They felt like fossilized vanity.