Egg Timers & The Songwriting Process

Now that FAWM (February Album Writing Month – 14 songs in 28 days) has officially started it’s really important to find ways to make time to develop your songwriting ideas into completed songs. As you would already know, I’m a huge advocate of building a songwriting ideas archive and constantly fine tuning your songwriting process.

For quite a while now I’ve been adding to and maintaining quite a substantial songwriting ideas archive of my own and the challenge I’m faced with now is that I have so many songwriting ideas at my disposal, I don’t know which one to start with first.

I’m becoming paralysed by too much choice. Hmmm, maybe the answer lies in randomness and restriction. Confused? Ok, let me explain.

In my experience, I’ve found that giving yourself all the time in the world to complete something allows the beastie called procrastination and your inner critic to join forces and provide you with (what seem to be) very valid reasons for not doing what your supposed to be doing.

If you restrict yourself to a deadline then your focus becomes much stronger and your procrastination/inner critic dialogue becomes less obvious. That’s the restriction part of the equation now what about the randomness part?

The randomness comes from picking any songwriting idea at random to start with. An example would be that I take a page full of possible song titles (see picture above) and pick one at random. Then, I set a timer for 10 minutes and in that time I start building on the randomly chosen songwriting idea.

Once the 10 minutes is up I determine whether I have sufficiant momentum to keep going. If not I start the process again with another randomly chosen songwriting idea from my archive.

The timer I’ll use will either be one of a few online timers or this wonderful example (see picture below). Whichever way I go it will make for an interesting outcome.

Here are the steps again for you to consider:

1. Pick a songwriting idea from your archive at random
2. Set your timer for 10 minutes and start expanding the songwriting idea
3. After 10 minutes if you’re going with the flow then keep going. If not, repeat process with another randomly chosen songwriting idea

Give it a go and see what happens and if you’re not registered with FAWM yet then consider doing so because deadlines are sometimes good for you.

Until next time, happy writing,

Corey Stewart
Singer/Songwriter/Musician

PS: Feel free to download my FREE eReport “11 Ways To Eliminate (Song) Writers Block FOREVER” if you need a little help getting out of a rut.

Keywords: songwriting idea, songwriting process, songwriting, songwriter, songwriting tip, songwriting help, songwriting zen, songwriting blog, corey stewart

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