Songwriting Exercise

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

Tags: Corey Stewart, music, song, Songwriter, Songwriting, songwriting blog, Songwriting Process, songwriting tip, Songwriting Zen, writer, zen

Sunday, February 1st, 2009 FAWM, Songwriting Exercise, Songwriting Ideas, Songwriting Process, Songwriting Tools No Comments

Songwriting Exercise – Using Peak Hour Traffic To Your Advantage

How about this for a songwriting exercise.

The next time you find yourself stuck in peak hour traffic, instead of feeling frustrated, stressed and angry about it, use the time to manifest songwriting ideas in your head.

I caught myself doing this on the way to work this morning and I can tell you, doing this is a better use of your time and energy than stressing out over an event you have no control over.

I used the scenery around me as reference points to get my creative juices flowing. I was focussing on things such as:

The weather – How does it make me feel?
People in cars – What were they thinking?
Buildings – Any landmarks nearby?
How am I feeling right now?
What am I doing this weekend?
What did I do last weekend?

In theory, once I’ve developed something I’m happy to record, I just phone my home or office number and put the songwriting idea on the answering machine for future reference.

This morning I didn’t snare any songwriting ideas however, it did inspire me to write this blog post so all is not lost.

I’ll try it again tonight and any other time I find myself stuck in traffic.

In fact, you could use this concept in any situation where you find yourself waiting for something. Examples that come to mind would include:

Bank queues
Doctors surgery
Waiting for public transport

Any other suggestions? I’d love to hear them.

Imagine what would happen if all songwriters used these times to their advantage rather than to their detriment?

There would be no road rage, less stress, we’d be more tolerant, patient and actually looking forward to waiting for something just so we can give ourselves some time to court the muse.

We all have time to write. We just have to be creative with how we find it.

Until next time, happy writing,

Corey Stewart
Singer/Songwriter/Musician

Keywords: songwriting, songwriter, songwriting tip, songwriting help, songwriting idea, songwriting exercise, songwriting blog, corey stewart

Tags: Corey Stewart, Creativity, lyrics, music, song, Songwriter, Songwriting, songwriting blog, songwriting tip, Songwriting Zen, writing, zen