How To Write A Song In 30 Days
You Can Write Songs typically endorses a fast paced method of writing. The overall idea is that your creative voice will have more room to flourish if you can out maneuver your inner critic. While the inner critic may play a vital role on the backend of your songwriting process during the editing phase, you may find it a hinderance during the creative process. That's why we recommend completing your initial writeup within 30 minutes. Sometimes this may look like a rough outline, other times a rough draft, but rarely will it look like a fully formed song.
The quick and dirty approach is not for everyone. Some writers like to take things slower and more methodically, fully considering each potential move. I dedicated the month of February to a single song that I worked on any where from fifteen minutes to two hours daily. I will say, this is a pretty rare form of writing. Usually when a writer says that they worked on a song for months or years they mean that they occasionally picked it up from time to time when they were sufficiently inspired.
A month is a longtime to dedicate to a sole artistic pursuit. So I came up with a loose schedule to make up for the time debt. The first two weeks of the month I spent writing the guitar part. I decided that if I was going to put all of my artistic efforts for the month into this one single piece then I should at least walk away as a better musician. So over the first week I wrote a fairly complex guitar part that I could just barely play fluently. I spent the next week practicing the guitar part so that I could get to a place where I felt confident and comfortable with my ability to play it while singing at the same time. Week three I wrote the lyrics, and week four I finished up my revisions.
After all this, I'm sorry to say that I really don't love the song. It just feels overdone to me, like I choked the life out of it. This may not be the case for you, but it was for me. Still, I wouldn't recommend it unless you really think it's for you. Instead, I'd recommend the 30:30:30 rule.
The 30:30:30 rule is a theoretical construct that I've recently come up with to describe what I think is an optimal songwriting process. It takes about 30 seconds to come up with an idea. Once you have the idea, spend 30 minutes or so writing the initial draft of the song. Finally, over the next 30 days, revise your song as you see fit. That last 30 is pretty loose. One could argue that a song is never quite finished. If you keep playing them then they'll keep changing and evolving in subtle or drastic ways. As Paul Valery said, "A poem is never finished, only abandoned." This is mostly true for songs too. The only difference is that the songwriting has unfinished business with their art even after they have called it done.