Version immersion

At 75, the man in the dark suit looks frail and his voice is croaky. But as soon as he starts to sing, the audience goes wild. "I've heard there was a secret chord," he begins. This is Leonard Cohen, performing one of his greatest songs: Hallelujah.

Brilliant though he was, he found writing it very painful, as a new documentary called Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song explains.

He is believed to have spent five years working on it. Estimates of how many verses he actually wrote range from 80 to 180. He ended up with seven. "To find that song, that urgent song, takes a lot of versions and a lot of work and a lot of sweat," he told an interviewer.

At one point he was reduced to sitting in his underwear, banging his head on the floor of his hotel room. Even after he recorded the song on his album Various Positions, he sang different versions of it on stage.

Writing it was only part of the agony Cohen suffered. When he took Various Positions to Columbia Records, they turned it down. It was finally released by another company 18 months after he recorded it.

Even then Hallelujah did not catch on. In 1994, suffering from depression, Cohen went to live in a Buddhist monastery in California.

He stayed there for five years. But soon after he left, he learnt that his song was to be used on the soundtrack of Shrek.

Shrek brought Hallelujah to a new, worldwide audience. Other artists hurried to record it. Alexandra Burke won The X Factor with it.¹

Other geniuses too have struggled with their creations. WB YeatsAn Irish poet and dramatist who is often considered one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century. wrote that "a line will take an hour maybe", and said that poetry was harder work than scrubbing the floor or breaking stones.

But John KeatsAn English Romantic poet who died in 1821 aged 25 from tuberculosis. insisted that "if poetry comes not as naturally as leaves on a tree, it had better not come at all."

Yes: Even the greatest writers and artists seldom get things right first time. To bring their work to perfection, they have to spend hours polishing it and trying out different versions of it.

No: The most essential element in any great creation is inspiration, which Matthew Arnold called a "spark from heaven". You can work as hard as you like, but without it you will get nowhere.    

Or... Different types of creativity need different degrees of inspiration. Writing a poem might be 90% inspiration and 10% polishing. With a novel or a painting the proportions could be reversed.