Songwriters, all writers, get their work done in many ways. But it’s hard to get a significant amount of work accomplished without some kind of routine. Some people have a yoga practice; they must maintain it to get the benefits. Musicians have to practice their instruments – regularly – to get good, and then get better. And so on.

For some writers it’s the pressure of a deadline that concentrates the mind. But those of us who live in a world without too many hard deadlines have to come up with a writing practice of our own that both works for us and gives the work the time and space it needs to come into being, grow, and develop.

I see two main benefits to finding and nurturing a writing practice, to having a regular routine.

The work builds up. To some extent, writing is a numbers game. Not every song is going to be a triumph. But if I write enough of them the chances of creating some that stand out greatly increases. Plus, to continue to improve, most of us have to write a lot. To expand our skills, we have to practice our craft.

Everything we do happens a step at a time (including walking). You can’t write more than one word, one chord, one note, at a time. You can think of whole phrases, but everything is brought into the world one element at a time.

The word is Incremental. Almost everything happens incrementally. Even things we notice suddenly, like say an earthquake, or even grass growing, has been developing for a period of time before we notice it.

Any body of work, any songwriter’s catalog, comes into being the same way – word by word, note by note, song by song. Without a habit of writing it’s hard to build such a body of work. And each new increment adds momentum that leads to the next.

Ideas have a place to go. I scribble down song ideas all the time. But if I didn’t know there was going to be a time in the near future when I would sit down and develop those ideas…. I not only wouldn’t keep track of them… I’m not even sure I’d even have the ideas in the first place! I’d certainly be less likely to take them seriously.

If you’ve ever been in therapy, it’s likely you’ve had the experience of knowing that at, say, noon on Thursday you’ll have the time and space to talk about what’s going on for you. So your mind, consciously and/or subconsciously, knows that it can explore that part of your psyche at that time, and prepares for it.

I think writing works more or less the same. Having a routine, a practice, signals to yourself (mostly to your subconscious, which does the bulk of the lifting) that your ideas are to be taken seriously, they have value, they are in fact the coin of the writers’ realm… and that at, say, noon on Thursday they’ll have time and space to emerge.

This makes it easier to tap into the creative flow. Almost anything one does regularly is like this. If you know it’s time to focus, usually you do. It may not happen right away, but it happens, if you continue to show up.

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