As those of us in the Boston area who did February Album Writing Month prepare to meet up this weekend to celebrate its conclusion, I thought I’d do a final reflection of what last month’s songwriting experience meant to me. In a nutshell, it was a fantastic experience all around: I wrote songs I loved, tried some new approaches, learned some useful strategies for songwriting, and really enjoyed the month’s creativity burst. Going into it, I wasn’t particularly prepared, and I didn’t really make a conscious decision to do it – just that there wasn’t any major reason not to. But it was such a great experience that I expect I’ll continue to participate for years to come. The FAWM community is a big part of what makes it work for me – there are people listening to and commenting on my songs, cheering me along and noticing whether I post or not. That definitely helps. Plus there are so many people writing great songs during the month; hearing them also inspires me. In a way this was my first completely clean FAWM. The rules of FAWM say that you can work on pre-existing songs as long as you’re coming up with something that’s (however you define it) half new. The first two years I did that, consciously, to make sure that I could actually stay on track to the writing goal. This year I didn’t – every word, note, arrangement, and even idea was completely new and generated entirely in February. And, yes, it sure was a lot easier to do when I wasn’t teaching at the same time, but knowing I can do it makes it easier to do. One of the things that was new this year was that I sometimes sat down to write without the slightest idea of what to write about. That’s where the lullaby I wrote came from – noodling around on the guitar. In other instances, I wrote a melody first and then figured out what kind of song it wanted to be. As with almost anything in life, I found that the most important thing is not to panic. Even when I was writing a song a day (for the concurrently-running Fearless Songwriter Week), I needed to just let my mind wander and not pressure it to reach closure on an idea too soon. And relatedly, I did a good job of making use of my subconscious. More than half of the songs I wrote for the month had their origin in middle-of-the-night thoughts or phrases (or melodies), and I learned to let my mind wander about an upcoming song topic just before going to sleep – it almost always resulted in some ideas bubbling up in the early hours of the morning, and those ideas were almost always excellent. I also learned that, especially when a song is already in progress, talking a walk and letting the lyrics run through my mind can also jostle loose some new phrases, especially when I’m stuck. Ultimately, it all comes back to the mantra my graduate school office mate gave me: the more you write, the more you write. When I’m actively writing I have more ideas, notice more things worth writing about, come up with cool phrases and bits of melodies. It was such a luxury to take the entire month of February to have that be the dominant aspect of my life. It’s a luxury I want to try to have more of in the rest of the year, and one I’ll definitely plan to indulge in next February