"Seventy percent of what I write, I throw out. I can write very easily, but writing original things is the hard bit"
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A professional reveals the unglamorous backbone of creativity: relentless selection. The ability to put words or music on the page is not the same as producing something that feels fresh and necessary. Fluency is volume; originality is extraction. Most first attempts arrive wearing the clothes of habit and influence, and it takes drafting and discarding to strip away the easy, familiar answers until something distinct appears.
Mike Rutherford built a career in bands where pressure for new sounds and songs was constant, from the progressive explorations of Genesis to the concise, emotive pop of Mike + The Mechanics. That body of work suggests a craftsman comfortable with waste. Writing easily means the tap runs; the hard part is sifting what flows, testing each idea against a standard that asks whether it adds anything to a crowded musical language. With a finite set of chords and rhythms, the obvious combinations surface first. Throwing out 70 percent is a practice of moving past the obvious.
There is a paradox here: the more one can write, the more one must be willing to delete. Originality needs surplus. It is not the lightning bolt of inspiration so much as a patient winnowing, a willingness to hear your own work as if it were a strangers and say no to most of it. That ruthless editorial stance protects the listener from cliche and the writer from complacency.
The line also demystifies creative work. It reframes success as curation, not just invention. A song like The Living Years or a late Genesis ballad feels inevitable because countless near misses were cut away. The discipline to abandon good ideas in pursuit of a rare, right idea is the hard bit Rutherford points to. It is the difference between producing content and making something that earns a place of its own.
Mike Rutherford built a career in bands where pressure for new sounds and songs was constant, from the progressive explorations of Genesis to the concise, emotive pop of Mike + The Mechanics. That body of work suggests a craftsman comfortable with waste. Writing easily means the tap runs; the hard part is sifting what flows, testing each idea against a standard that asks whether it adds anything to a crowded musical language. With a finite set of chords and rhythms, the obvious combinations surface first. Throwing out 70 percent is a practice of moving past the obvious.
There is a paradox here: the more one can write, the more one must be willing to delete. Originality needs surplus. It is not the lightning bolt of inspiration so much as a patient winnowing, a willingness to hear your own work as if it were a strangers and say no to most of it. That ruthless editorial stance protects the listener from cliche and the writer from complacency.
The line also demystifies creative work. It reframes success as curation, not just invention. A song like The Living Years or a late Genesis ballad feels inevitable because countless near misses were cut away. The discipline to abandon good ideas in pursuit of a rare, right idea is the hard bit Rutherford points to. It is the difference between producing content and making something that earns a place of its own.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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