My last two years in graduate school, my office mate was an older-and-wiser postdoctoral fellow, which means he had already successfully written a dissertation by the time I was struggling to write mine. At some point during this period he typed up and printed out a phrase that he taped to my computer. It said “The more you write, the more you write.” I still have that printed phrase. At the time I wasn’t sure what to make of it. A cynic could see it as something about the purposelessness of writing – there’s no ending point, and all you get for writing more is more writing. It’s like what my friend (and one of my favorite songwriters) Brian of the band We’re About 9 said about his misinterpretation of a They Might Be Giants lyric as “like the laundry’s infinite” – you clean it, you wear it, it gets dirty again, you clean it . . . My current motivational phrase for my academic work is ‘work gets done when you do it” which is actually my best guess about what my office mate probably meant initially by his phrase: you’re only going to get the thing done that needs to be done if you do it, rather than sitting around procrastinating and worrying about the fact that it needs to get done. But his original phrase has followed me through my life since graduate school like a zen koan. And right now the way I see it is that writing is a practice. It’s hard to do, and the only way to do it is to do it, and the more you do it the less daunting it seems and so the more of it you can do. But more importantly than that, it’s easier to do the more you do it. I see that in my academic life – when I’m trying to get myself to do a big project, giving myself a daily writing quota is what gets me going, and having a lot of text under my belt makes me panic less about whether I can get it done or not, and gets the ideas flowing. Nowhere is that more true than of songwriting. It’s not only that working on a song already in progress is less scary than starting one from scratch, although that is the case. It’s that The Song Gods (as I like to call them) visit me to deliver material for songs in progress or ideas for new ones when I’m in a stretch of working on songwriting. And although I could spin a mythology about those Gods only deigning to send good ideas when I’ve proven that I’m worth the investment because I’m actually writing, I think that it’s really that when my active brain spends some part of the day engaged in the process of writing my subconscious picks it up at other points. I’m much more likely to wake up in the middle of the night with a good turn of phrase if during the day I’ve been thinking actively about writing. I’ll start coming up with words or rhymes while on a walk, not even thinking about music, if I have been thinking about it recently. The more I write, the more material I have available to write, because my whole being, conscious and subconscious is accustomed to writing and so is continuing to do it even without conscious direction. I say this at a point in my year when I’m giving as much attention as I would like to any of my writing – academic or songwriting. I know what I need to do – I need to set aside time to write; to make it a regular part of my day and week. April is the hardest month of my year (and the early part of May is no picnic either), schedule-wise. and various other aspects of the music business – including playing gigs! – has been taking more of my time than usual as well. So I can’t promise that my writing for the next three weeks will be the focus of my day. But I know from experience that even a little bit of writing begets more writing, so I need to put that knowledge into action. The more you write, the more you write.