How did the great composers write their music?
Not too many pieces took years. Infact other than Wagners Der Ring des Nibelungen (he worked on it for about 26 years but it's sixteen hours of great music which is an enormous accomplishment) I can't really think off one (I'm sure there are a couple others). Beethoven didn't write music for a peroid of time and then released his ninth but it didn't take him years to write. Different ones did different things. Mozart wrote pieces in his head and then wrote them down on paper. Beethoven wrote something and corrected it (sometimes rewrote it like in Leonores case in which he wrote more than one version) and corrected it again and again. I don't think many used improvisation or wrote something using a Piano rather they wrote it in their head and then played it on a Keyboard to see how it sounded and corrected it from their (because its one of the first thing a teacher will tell you about compostion, DO NOT USE AN INSTRUMENT, because on instruments you have patterns your fingers want to follow and you typically want not to follow these while composing). Still I'm sure they all had different methods.
Drawing vs Writing: Opinions?
Oh, man...that's a tough question. I draw and write regularly as hobbies and I adore both, but drawing has become my career. Why? Because, for me, drawing is far easier. Writing has got to be one of the most challenging forms of art. With drawing, you're allowed to just draw what you see without having a concept behind it, though having a concept will make for better art. But if you want you can just draw from a photograph, make it look gorgeous, and TA-DA you have a beautiful piece of art. Writing isn't like that at all. Unlike a drawing, people won't just take a glance at a book and decide whether it's good or not. Writing requires intensive analysis. You can't usually write a little ditty with no themes or meaning and expect to be taken seriously. Every word you put down on paper is expected to contribute to a mood, a theme, a metaphor. It's so much harder to go through that long developing process of writing than it is to put a pencil to paper. For me, at least. Which is more of an art form? I don't know if you can say one is more of an art form than the other. Drawing has long been a way of communicating symbolically, while writing is often more concise and straightforward. In that way, I guess one could say that drawing is more artistic/abstract. But I have to say that to be a writer you have to be super creative if you want to create an enjoyable, original story. So I guess in that way, writing is more imaginitive, especially because most stories pull from the same pool of themes, so in order to be original, a writer has to come up with different ways to express a theme that hundreds of other writers have already used. And even so, it's hard to compare writing and drawing. They're both great art forms. Great question; I hope I sufficiently answered it. :D