The only claim I make for my weekly Songwriting blog is factual: this is my 100th blogpost.  I’ve written one every week for two years, taking off about 3 weeks a year.  It’s been an interesting experience.

A little over two years ago, when I was considering doing the blog, I consulted with two eminent bloggers – one my good friend, Billy Mernit (the writer and screenwriting guru with a popular blog about Romantic Comedies), the other my brother and sometime collaborator, ‘TV’s Frank’ Conniff (the comedian and comedy writer with 35,000 Twitter followers).  The one piece of advice they both gave me was, “Whatever you do, do it consistently.”

This made sense to me because I’ve learned that the only way I get anything done, including writing songs, is to do it consistently, more or less disregarding whether I ‘feel like’ doing it or not.  The truth is, I often don’t feel like doing much.  Not that I don’t want to do it; I just don’t feel like it at the moment.  I’ll do it later.

To circumvent that inertia, I try to set a goal for doing something I think is worthwhile for me… decide if I have the willingness to at least try to follow through… If the answer is ‘Yes’, then I do my imperfect best to move forward with the plan, whether I feel like doing it at the designated time or not.

When I say I sometimes don’t feel like doing something – in this case, writing the blog; but it could be writing a song, going to the gym… anything – it doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the activity.  In fact, often it’s quite the opposite.  When I start doing what I was resisting – but that underneath is actually important to me – I then remember how much I like it and why I wanted to do it in the first place.

I really do like challenges, but intuitively I resist them – I’d rather stay in my present (often uncomfortable) comfort zone.  Commitments get me going and remind me of what is truly important to me… whether at that moment  I’m feeling it or not.

When I started writing this weekly blogpost I had no idea how far I would go with it.  (Actually, one hundred posts later, that’s still true.)

Would I run out of things to say?  Not a big problem – yet.  Songwriting is a vast universe; there always seems to be something to talk about.  It’s also something with a relatively few basic principles that I’ve found, in my teaching and workshops, bear repeating.  My job is not to make up new stuff, it’s to tell the truth as I see it in a way that will help songwriters (including me) write better songs.  So there will always be some repetition.  If I don’t overdo it, that seems right.

Would it be of any use to other songwriters?  I’ve gotten a lot of positive and encouraging feedback.  The folks with discouraging feedback mostly keep to themselves, of course, but I’m sure they’re out there.  Sometimes writers with a technical songwriting problem tell me that  they found in one of my posts an approach that’s new to them, or that they’d forgotten; or that they feel a little less alone with a struggle or block they’re going through.

Would anyone read me, or even care?  People are reading.  How much they’re caring is hard to say.  I still hope that I’m providing the proverbial drop in the bucket of information, technique, encouragement, identification.

As a result of the blog, would I gain more visibility for my Songwriting workshops and my own songs?  It’s difficult to exactly quantify this, but I’d say Yes.  When someone goes to my website they now, along with listening to my songs, can see scores of blogposts by someone who, whether you agree with him or not, is obviously committed and passionate about songs and songwriting.  I don’t think this can be bad.

As I continued to post, would I grow and improve at it?  Would I learn how to blog?  The jury’s out on this one – you tell me!  Like anything, online blogging is a form unto itself.  I certainly feel more comfortable with the form that I did two years ago.  The opportunity to write about and clarify my thoughts about songwriting has been extremely valuable to me, particularly for my songwriting.

It’s important to me to get more comfortable and expressive with this form.  My father was a newspaperman.  During his career he did pretty much every job on the writing and editorial side of a newspaper, from cub reporter to columnist (3x a week) to Editor-in-Chief, and he always said that writing the column was the hardest job he ever had.  Although my weekly blog pales next to the pressure level of a nationally-syndicated column, now maybe I understand him a little better and have had the chance to explore for myself a calling that runs in the family.

Writing something and then being committed to publishing it that day, having a limited time to agonize over it, having to let go knowing it’s not ‘perfect’… that has been interesting… and tough… and useful.

Ultimately the best reason I’ve found for for doing anything is simply this – it seems like it’s worth doing.  It’s a good use of my talents, and helps grow them, relative to other things I could choose to do.  Hopefully it helps someone else.  I know it helps me.

Beyond that, the only thing one can ever be sure of is the Law Of Unintended Consequences.