Joni Mitchell’s unique method for better writing: “Copiously and then condense”
Joni Mitchell became a legend the second she mastered the art of transforming experiences into high art. But how, exactly, did she do it?
When Mitchell spoke on feminism in 2013, a lot of people were floored, and not in a good way. At the time, Mitchell candidly told Jian Ghomeshi on CBC that feminism, as she saw it in today’s world, was too masculine. Though entirely possible she was misplaced in how she actually felt with her hostility towards “nasty feminists”—whatever that means—her words hurt. Mainly because of how her music clashed with such a callous statement and her notes on womanhood, a staple of her own art, which have, in ways, helped a lot of female listeners find their path in dark times.
Thankfully, when we think of Mitchell, it’s less now about these harsh words than the art itself. And, incidentally, it’s about all those moments when her trials and tribulations come to the surface. Like across Blue, which didn’t just reveal a woman scorned by her own lessons in love and loss, but a woman whose resilience ultimately defined her. At the tail-end of one of the most musically innovative movements in history, and as someone on the precipice of a different standard of expression.
It’s also the confidence she had with being vulnerable, too, enough to start the entire record that way, saying, “I am on a lonely road and I am travelling/Travelling, travelling, travelling…” And often, it’s not about Mitchell saying things poetically, or in a way that immediately grips you. It’s how they unravel over time, waiting for the moment that you’ve been through enough, experienced enough and grown wiser enough for them to actually, finally, make sense.
Like the verse from ‘The Last Time I Saw Richard’ that says, “I’m gonna blow this damn candle out / I don’t want nobody comin’ over to my table / I got nothing to talk to anybody about / All good dreamers pass this way some day / Hidin’ behind bottles in dark cafes”. The goosebumps you feel come from the way she so powerfully captures despair.
Simultaneously, it’s how she captures one of the worst things a writer can experience: not having a word to say about anything, nothing at all. The dreaded block. But she does it in a way that turns it into poetry, turns the concept of nothing into words that hit. Because even when there’s nothing to talk about, there’s beauty in misery. So how does she do it?
Well, it’s easy to say she just has a knack for words, which is half true. However, with talent also comes technique, and Mitchell also knew how to take her thoughts, ideas and experiences and make beautiful worlds of words of them, while also knowing exactly what to do to get to the point where they were fully-formed songs. A lot of why she excelled in her field in the first place came from her natural ability to write, but a large part of it was also how she wrote and wrote and wrote, even if it didn’t make sense. Even if it was just wordy garble.
When she was asked specifically about how she made poetry out of her experiences, she once explained how it all comes from a place of wanting to process herself and make that a form of expression. She said, “Things stick in my craw and they rotate endlessly, and if I don’t clear them, I could go mad. And I wanna clear them in an interesting manner, and the arts seem to be the answer to that.”
She further explained, “Yes, I do smoke endlessly, I do not so much rewrite as write copiously and then condense. A lot of these themes are very very large, and people don’t like long long songs, so they have to be condensed down to three verses.”
So, when you come across words that hit somewhere deep or feel important without immediately making sense, it’s because it was Mitchell never pretending to be something she’s not, and letting her fears, insecurities, and vulnerabilities pour out like a page in a diary before shaping them into the highest form of art.
