Diligence is emerging as my key theme of 2011.  I’ve been able to make amazing progress on many aspects of my life by simply instituting regular routines and diligently sticking to it.  Below I’d like to share with you why and how you should apply it to your songwriting.

Words from Accomplished Creators

Steven Pressfield and Elizabeth Gilbert come to mind when I think of creative people who tout the idea of “showing up everyday” approach to creative process.  No, neither of them are songwriters — if you need a songwriter example, look no further than Diane Warren (half way through the interview, she talks about her routines.  Did her routines come as the result of the success, or is it the other way?  I think the latter).

Pressfield looks at his craft — writing — sort of like an employment.  You show up everyday, rain or shine.  You do it even when you don’t feel like it.  You don’t over-identify with it (it’s just a job).  Your work is evaluated by your real-world customers/clients.  Gilbert discusses how you can’t control when the inspiration strikes — so the best practice is to just show up regularly, make yourself available to Muse.

Does the comparison to a day job/employment rub you the wrong way?  It certainly did with me, for a long time.  I read rock-star interviews where artists claim “I’ll quit if it starts to feel like a job.”

Well, if songwriting is your hobby, then by all means, stick with that approach.  If it’s your life-long passion, though, I highly recommend you institute diligence to it.

Making Yourself Available to Inspiration

Indeed, my personal experience is that inspiration strikes often after I take a few stabs at getting something going, such as a chord progression, a lyrical hook, or a bridge idea.  It goes like this:

1. I sit down with an intention to write a song, or put it more accurately, to start or make progress on a song.
2. I start poking around with existing ideas or fiddling around on my guitar, just trying to catch something interesting
3. There’s a magic period — perhaps somewhere between 5-15 minutes — when I enter The Zone.  Once in The Zone, I’m really creative, and things come together quickly.

Of course, I’ve had a number of occasions where an inspiration strikes unexpectedly (listen to Gilbert talk about Tom Waits example) and I scramble around trying to capture it.  But often my songs are born out of, then polished, minutes after I start my writing session.  And that act of starting has nothing to do with inspiration or “feeling like it.”   So inspiration doesn’t come first — my showing-up invites inspiration to come to me.

How to Enter The Zone

It’s elusive and tricky, but I find that there are definitely best practices in terms of maximizing my chances of entering The Zone.  Some that come to my mind are:

• Be frustration-free.
• Do it early in the day: by early, I mean before I do other things.  The sooner I get to songwriting, the better, so that I can approach it with my mind less clattered.
• Leave judgment and critics at the door: Just play – as in, fool around.
• Be of general good health: a good night’s sleep, exercised, plenty of rest, good food in my tummy.

To me, perhaps the first item is the most critical.  If I have any frustration in mind, it makes it much harder to put that away in a drawer somewhere in my mind and then make the trip to The Zone.

Practice Makes Perfect

And even with the best intentions or setup, sometimes I don’t get into The Zone.  And that’s OK — I just pat myself on the back for showing up and taking a stab nevertheless.  But more often than not, I do hit it and make good progress.  And I get better at entering The Zone the older I get, or I should say, the longer I’ve been at this craft of songwriting.

So, if you are serious about developing and improving your songwriting, I highly recommend you make it a regular routine to just engage in songwriting.  We all tend to look for tips, tricks and other shortcuts to writing good songs, but in reality, diligence is the most reliable ingredient in improving our craft.  Even if  you sought no teacher/mentor, read no books/interviews, did nothing otherwise to try to get better — just by showing up to do it more often, you can’t help but grow and improve as a songwriter.  That’s just how it works for most things in life, and songwriting is no exception.

So, want to write great songs, hit songs, impactful songs?  Show up regularly.  If you don’t hit it today, that’s OK.  That’s not the important part — or in Gilbert’s words, that’s not our part.  Our part is just to show up, to make ourselves available.

And that’s the single most impactful ingredient to writing good songs.