Who: Daniel Levitin

Claim To Fame: Daniel J. Levitin is an award-winning neuroscientist, musician, and best-selling author. His research encompasses music, the brain, health, productivity and creativity. Levitin has published more than 300 articles, in journals including Science, Nature, PNAS, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal. His research has been featured over 1800 times in the popular press, including 17 articles in The New York Times, and in The London Times, Scientific American, and Rolling Stone.  He is a frequent guest on NPR and CBC Radio and has appeared on Good Morning America, The Today Show, CBS This Morning, and CNN. His TED talk is among the most popular of all time. He is the author of four New York Times bestselling books: This Is Your Brain On Music, The World in Six Songs, The Organized Mind and Successful Aging, as well as the international bestseller A Field Guide to Lies.

Where To Find Daniel: His Website, Amazon, Twitter

Praise For Daniel: “Dan Levitin has more insights per page than any other neuroscientist I know. The Organized Mind is smart, important, and as always, exquisitely written.”—Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness

When and where do you like to write? Are you the same-thing-every-day kind of writer or can you write anytime, anywhere?

It took me decades to figure this out, but I’m most creative and effective at generating new ideas first thing in the morning, and I’m most effective at editing right before I go to bed. That sets up a great cycle (for me) because the first thing I think of when I wake up is whatever I was editing the night before.

So my routine is that I get up early, usually around 5:30 am, take a shower, and then I go right to my writing—wherever I am. Whatever I’m working on, I need to allow myself to become fully immersed in it. I can’t put too fine a point on it, but even minor distraction is the enemy of productivity and creativity for me. So I’ve learned not even to open my email until I’ve written for at least two hours straight first thing in the morning. By the way that shower is a great idea generator—the hot water spraying my head, the solitary and comforting space—I usually solve some kind of creative problem during my morning shower and then get right to it. I try to write 1,000 words a day of prose, knowing that (in my experience) I’m probably only going to use half of what I wrote in the final book, article, or scientific paper.

With songs, I don’t measure the words. They’re a completely different animal, because with the other writing, I usually have a pretty good idea of what I want to say and how to say it, or at least what I need to read or think about in order to find the data and the story that follows from them. The songs need to find themselves and that takes time. Some songs come to me quickly—completely in 30 minutes. Others take ten years or more. One kind isn’t necessarily better than the other—they just have different gestation periods.

I am lucky that I can write anywhere and so I do. I get a lot written in airplanes, the backs of cars, trains, hotel rooms. My wife and I drove from our home in LA last week to visit her mother in Berkeley and during the half of the drive that my wife was behind the wheel, I wrote 2,500 words of a new short story.

I also have some very special places that are especially inspiring to me. I’ve written parts of my last four books in Joni Mitchell’s beautiful garden while she was inside painting. We’d take a break, get together for tea or coffee and sandwiches, and then go back to work. I have friends in Santa Barbara who have a great guest house and they let me come up there a few weeks a year to have a retreat surrounded by nature. I wrote part of The World in Six Songs on the front porch of my friend Jamshed Bharucha’s house in Medford, Mass., an historic house that was “Grandmother’s house” in the song Over the river and through the woods. In 2008 I bought a cabin in the Quebec countryside in a little town called Ste. Melanie. That was heaven for writing, absolute heaven, any time of year. I would go there most weekends and during breaks from my University job at McGill and write up a storm of music and articles and sections of books. The realities of owning a remote cabin, however, the difficulty in getting plumbers and electricians and roofers and such, made it impractical, though, and sadly, I sold it in 2014. Now I have an oil painting of the region around it on the wall right in front of me in my home office.

I wrote a great deal of The Organized Mind in pubic and university libraries. My favorite library for writing is the Wellesley library in Massachusetts. (There really is something about Massachusetts that is good for writing, and so much good writing has come from there, from Hawthorne, to Thoreau, to William James, Jane Austin, B.F. Skinner, E.O. Wilson, Jamaica Kincaid…) Each space has a different resonance and sparks different thoughts. Also inspiring is that home office I just mentioned because all my books are there and I just love having so many resources at my fingertips, and my recording studio is in the bedroom right next to it.

Do you have any pre-writing rituals or habits before you sit down to write?

I always sit down right after my morning shower with a strong cup of green tea, usually sencha. Lately I’ve been preceding all of that with a good workout on the elliptical and that’s even more helpful for me to focus. I just got off the elliptical five minutes ago.

Have you ever experienced a prolonged creative rut or a spell of writer’s block? How did you get through them?

All the time! The most recent one was for a book review I did for the WSJ for David Eagleman’s book Livewired a few weeks back. I read the book and took notes as I went, but the trick with these, as with the NYT book reviews I’ve written, is that they are supposed to be literary and to introduce a narrative that grows out of the book, while introducing some novel perspectives that aren’t necessarily in the book being reviewed. For a week I just couldn’t think of a framing for how to do it and then it all came to me at once—in the shower.

I don’t know that this is really writer’s block, per se, but in between books I always go through a period of wondering what I’m going to write next. I typically start three or four different books and see which one takes hold. That can be slow going and frustrating because without a commitment to what I’m going to write, it’s easy to just sit there and stare at the screen.

All of your work is research intensive. What does your reading and researching process look like? Do you have a system or method for organizing material you may want to use in future writing?

Hah! I guess you could call me a hoarder or a packrat in this respect. I am constantly writing notes to use later, usually on 3×5 index cards, but I also collect newspaper and magazine articles, scan pages of books. When I get a critical mass of research materials, I open up a folder on my computer for the scanned notes and pdf’s, and usually a physical folder in my filing cabinet for things that, for one reason or another, I haven’t scanned. I actually hate reading on the screen, so if I’m really into a project, I’ll fill up folder after hanging file folder of stuff that’s highlighted and annotated heavily. I would estimate that for everything I’ve published—books, articles and songs—I’ve got material and notes for ten times as many things that I started but didn’t finish—yet. I do go back and eventually use these things.

A case in point of this “amass-and-horde and wait-until-the-time-is-right” approach is my book A Field Guide to Lies (Dutton/Penguin, 2016). I started collected notes for that in 2001 and filled two entire Banker’s Box R-Kive file boxes with materials, and then, just dove right into it when I was ready to work on a new book.

An even better example comes from my music writing, but I looked ahead and I see you have a separate question about that, so I’ll hold off on that for a sec.

So if you were to come into my office, you’d find stacks of 3×5 cards on my desk for things I’m working on now; little plastic index card boxes that are marked RESEARCH IDEAS, SONGWRITING, BOOK WRITING and HOUSEHOLD TO DO. And you’d find four full sized file drawers full of articles, notes, and collected materials for 100 different projects that are “in progress.” I have the luxury of just being able to thumb through all these and pick the one that tickles me at the moment. I figure if it appeals to me, maybe it will appeal to someone else.

Your research is wide-ranging—neurology, psychology, music, health, productivity, creativity. Can you talk about some of the ways you apply your research to your creative life and writing routine?

I don’t consider that I have anything novel to add about this that a diligent and resourceful person couldn’t figure out on their own. But here’s what I’ve come up with.

(1) I’m keenly aware that every human brain is different, and every human being is different. So I find what works for me and go with it. I’m also not complacent about it—I’m always looking for ways to tweak it, ways to improve.

(2) Those artistic and scientific works we consider to be the most influential tend not to be utterly different from what came before. Shakespeare, Mozart, Picasso, Dylan—thieves all of them, but clever thieves. So I read widely and I’m always looking for inspiration in other writers—the way they phrase things; their diction and voice; the way they lay out a series of thoughts. It’s been said many times: if you want to be a good writer, you have to read a lot.

(3) It’s good to have an ear for the music of speech. When we’re reading, a voice inside our brains is speaking the words to us, and of course, with audiobooks, we are literally hearing them. I’m always subvocalizing or talking as a write, in order to make sure that the flow and the rhythm are right: the alternation between short sentences and long; the pauses that I build in using punctuation; and I try to pay attention to the overall melody and prosody of each sentence.

(4) Truly successful writers, with very few exceptions, spend most of their time editing. I do not consider myself a particular good writer, but I am a tireless editor. No book of mine went through fewer than 50 complete revisions, and no article fewer than 20. (If you don’t like my writing now, you should have seen those first 10 drafts!)

To this point, one of my favorite writers is Mike Lankford, whose two books I think are masterworks: Life In Double Time and Becoming Leonardo. He and I were comparing notes because Leonardo came out while I was finishing up Successful Aging. My book went through 60 revisions. I asked Mike how many revisions Leonardo went through because it reads beautifully. He told me 77. Now I know: if I had done 17 more revisions, maybe my book would be 70% as good as his instead of 50% as good.

You are also a songwriter. Do you have a different approach or mental frameworks for writing each? Do the mechanics of your writing routine change?

Yes, songs are really different because I’m never under a deadline with them, other than an internal deadline I set. That means I can spend as much time on them as I want, revising and revising, reworking. One of my songwriting mentors, Rodney Crowell, told me about ten years ago to take more time with my songs than I was up to that point, and to keep revising until I don’t think I can do any better. For several years, Joni Mitchell and I would get together every month or two and play each other whatever new songs we were working on. I was amazed to see that sometimes Joni would work for six months on a single couplet. It never occurred to me before to do that, and frankly, although I love songwriting, I never thought my songs were worth putting that much time into. Joni and Rodney persuaded me that they were, and they’ve been wonderful champions of my songwriting.

In terms of organizing material for songs, I have been sketching song ideas on various voice recorders, cassette tapes, dictaphones, and so on since 1978. I’ve kept every one. They’re not all catalogued, but I’ve got them. When I feel like writing and nothing comes to me, I just go through some of these thousands of snippets and find something to run with. I have a number of songs I love the melodies of, but I was never happy with the words. I’ve been going back and systematically rewriting them. Then, I go through a series of demos, trying different musical approaches to them, different instrumentation, and so on, until something sounds right.

What books or writers have most influenced the way you think and the way you write?

When I was just starting out in my twenties, I read The Paris Review and devoured the writer interviews. Later, Paul Zollo’s first book of songwriter interviews came out and that was huge. Just hearing from others about the craft, the routines, was very influential.

I love language and so I’m always looking for beautiful expression. Joni Mitchell, Guy Clark, and Rodney Crowell inspire me hugely as songwriters. Paul Simon inspires me hugely as a singer and writer too, but what I write is so different from his work that I’m not trying to emulate it as much as I’m trying to draw inspiration from the twists and turns he takes. And Rodney encouraged me to spend more time reading poetry. Right now, I’m completely immersed in Byron and Emily Dickenson. There is so much fantastic imagery there.

For book and article writing, the list is long. Isaac Asimov for his clarity. Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Robbins for their casualness, irreverence, and for breaking the fourth wall. Oliver Sacks for his intimacy and charisma on the page. In the psychology of music, there are no better writers than Lisa Margulis, Indre Viskontas, and Diana Deutsch. My wife, the neuroscientist Heather Bortfeld, is a great writer. I find inspiration in reading what she writes, and in her feedback on my writing. Back on novels, I’ve read everything by Coetzee, Jonathan Tropper, Murakami, Dickens, Chekhov, and I often go back and read them again and again.

My agents, Sarah Chalfant and Rebecca Nagel, are hugely influential on the way that I think about my own writing—finding my voice, finding the right frame, and focusing on the big issues. Many agents aren’t just handling the business and contracts. They do everything and they’re great at what they do. They send me these emails after reading something I’ve sent to run by them, and those emails are masterpieces of expression, insight, and context-setting. Someday I want to publish a book just of our correspondence.

There were three encounters that dramatically changed the way I think about editing, by the way. (I suppose if I was better organized I would have mentioned these earlier, when we were talking about organizational strategies.) First was when my friend Geoff Emerick, the Beatles recording engineer, gave me copies of some of their demos from The White Album and Magical Mystery Tour. I was astonished at how awful they sounded! They were missing notes, getting off the beat; it was a ragged, garage-sounding band. Around the same time my friend Roger Nichols, Steely Dan’s recording engineer, played me some of their demos. These weren’t ragged in terms of musicianship, but they were very, very far from the masterpieces that their recordings became. These demos didn’t sound much better than mine—what distinguished them was that the people who made them had the capacity, skill, and creativity to keep hammering away at it until they got something amazing. I would not say I’ve ever gotten anything even close to amazing, but it’s inspiring to know that even masterworks started out sounding awful.

The third encounter was that I went to Oliver Sack’s birthday party in 2008 and everyone was invited to bring a date. My girlfriend wasn’t able to come (she’s kicking herself to this day) but Kate Edgar, in Oliver’s office, suggested that I go with Jill Krementz, who also didn’t have a date. Jill is a great photographer and the widow of Kurt Vonnegut. We had a wonderful time and afterwards, I went to her home for a cup of tea and to look at some of her photos. As we walked from the living room up the stairs to her studio, we passed an old typewriter on an old desk, kind of squeezed in under the stairway, with a page of unfinished writing on it. “This was Kurt’s desk,” she said. From such a humble corner so much brilliance came. And she confirmed to me the rumors that he revised incessantly. I’ve always thought his books sounded like your drunk uncle just telling stories on the front porch. But, she says, they didn’t start out that way. He could write a novel in six months but it took him another year and a half to make it sound spontaneous.

What is your advice to aspiring writers?

You have to love words. You have to love picking exactly the right word for something, no matter how long it takes. You have to have a sense of melody and rhythm so that you can aim for poetic qualities even in prose. And revise, revise, revise—probably ten times more than you think is reasonable. Start numbering your drafts at version -5. Don’t even think of showing anyone what you’ve written until version 1. You really have to believe that your work is worth the effort. And keep your email and your cell phone turned off when you are writing. Always.

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