If you’ve been reading this blog at all in the last month and a half, or have seen me in person, you know that I participated in February Album-Writing Month in (you guessed it) February, an event in which songwriters commit to attempting to write fourteen songs in the shortest month of the year. And I succeeded – I wrote fourteen songs last month, most of which I’m extremely happy with. It was a transformative experience in a number of ways. In some ways the most valuable experience was simply discovering that I could do it. I’m not sure there’s ever been an entire year in which I’ve written fourteen songs, so the ability to write that many in a month feels nothing short of miraculous. And knowing that you can do something makes something that previously seemed difficult much less so. Plenty of people would be daunted by the idea of writing a book, but I’ve now written six of them, so I know I can do it. And I know that, if I need to get a lot written on a book in a short period of time, I can set myself a daily word requirement of 1000 (or even more) words, and when I write all those words every day, a book starts to appear. I also know that, even if I’ve stopped exercising for the winter (except for my daily walk to work), I could put on running shoes and run three miles right now and could easily be ready to run ten miles with a few weeks notice to ramp up. When I first started running, in sixth grade, I was in better shape than I am now (I was a serious gymnast), but I’d never run and so I didn’t know I could do it. Because I’ve done those things, I know they’re possible. I’m sure there are many people around for whom the idea of writing a book, running 10 (or just three) miles, or even writing a song is impossible to imagine. But it can be done, and once you’ve done it, you know it can be done. I now know I can write a song (on average) every other day . . . while still having a day job, and a dog with medical crises, and some semblance of a life. And I know I can do it (and towards the end of the month I trusted I could do it) even if I had no idea what I was going to write about. The first few songs were written building off of things I’d started or thought of previously. But before long I had exhausted those possibilities and even mostly run out of previous lines scribbled in the notebook I keep by the side of my bed. And I nevertheless went down to my music room and emerged two or three hours later with a song. So how was it possible? A few things helped, I think. First, even though I had other pressures in life, I did carve out a lot of time, and even more importantly, mental space, for writing. When you show up to write, writing is more likely. (And when you simply don’t carve out any time to do it, it should be no surprise that it doesn’t happen.) There are other things I learned from my daily academic-writing quotas: if you know you have to write something the next day, you prepare the previous day. While doing FAWM I kept an ear out for phrases, wrote down anything in my mind in the middle of the night, spent the time after finishing a song thinking about what the next one might be about. So even when I didn’t have a well-developed plan for what to write a song about on a given day, I had some things to try out. And when you’re doing a lot of a given type of writing, it becomes a part of your life. I was thinking about songs and what works with songs, and song ideas . . . and I was listening to songs by other FAWM folks and thinking about what I like in a song. When I’m writing songs, I have more ideas for songs, and more creativity about what to do with them. People who pose the “quantity versus quality” tradeoff implicitly assume that there’s a finite amount of creativity. But I find that creativity begets creativity. The more songs I write, the more songs I can write. For me, though, the biggest accomplishment of FAWM was finishing songs. It’s not that I don’t finish songs – I generally do. But that’s the part that takes me the longest. My standard model is to write two verses and a chorus reasonably quickly, and then spend a l-o-n-g time before actually completing the song. Some of that is editing (although I tend to edit a lot as I go along), but a lot of it is being afraid, if I have a song that I think has real potential, of screwing it up. Or maybe actually the fear is of succeeding – of finishing the song and then having to find out whether it’s any good. So I dither and take a long time at writing that last verse, or line, or word. But if I was going to succeed at FAWM, I didn’t have that luxury. I had to finish songs, and I had to finish them fast. Songs are still hard to finish – the last verse is usually the hardest one for me to write (or whichever piece of the song is missing at the end – it’s missing because it wasn’t easy or good enough on the first try). So I had to push through and figure out what needed to be done to finish the song I was working on. I don’t think the songs are any the worse for doing that stage more quickly – if anything, they might be better for it, because I was still in the same frame of mind as when I started the song. And it meant I couldn’t let the psychological factors – like fear – take over.