Here’s How to Write 14 Songs in 28 Days

Today is day one of the yearly songwriting challenge called February Album Writing Month (FAWM).

The goal of FAWM is to write 14 songs in 28 days — that’s one song every two days, all month long.

If you choose to participate, you can write instrumentals, you can write lyrics, or you can write both lyrics and music. Collaboration is encouraged.

“Think of FAWM as a big, free, month-long, international songwriting workshop that only requires an Internet connection (instead of a plane ticket and hefty registration fee). Other fawmers will become your friends and accountability partners; sources of feedback and creative growth.” — fawm.org

Songwriter Burr Settles kicked off the first FAWM challenge in February 2004. Four songwriters participated that month. Today, there are well over a thousand active FAWMers each year.

You can sign up on the FAWM website.

Why try FAWM?

• Writing under a deadline can strengthen your creative discipline and encourage you to compose every day.
• FAWM has a big, supportive, international community. Songsters and songstresses all over the world are dashing out lyrics and roughing out melodies every day this month, and it’s fun to be part of that.
• Unless you choose to donate, FAWM is free.

FAWM is an exercise in quantity over quality, and it encourages you to finish lots of first drafts quickly. The assumption is that by cranking out so much work, you’ll learn something about the craft of songwriting, and hopefully write a few keepers while you’re at it.

FAWM prods you to jump in and get your hands dirty. Many songwriters think a lot about writing, but neglect to actually write.

Many songwriters find themselves stuck in long dry spells, holding out for some big, exciting, perfect idea to strike. One of the most valuable things you can learn from FAWM is that good ideas are much more likely to come while you’re actually doing the dirty, risky work of creation.

Drawbacks of FAWM

• The tight schedule of turning out one song every two days might leave you with very little time for revision or rewriting (or even a personal life).
• Quantity sometimes does come at the cost of quality. It might be best to think of it as a month-long brainstorming exercise. You may write an album’s worth of songs, but don’t expect that they’ll all be album quality.

If you’re cool with these potential drawbacks, go for it.

Next up: MARM

My suggestion for FAWM is that it’s a great time to take some of those pesky riffs and stray lines that’ve been going nowhere — and very quickly prototype them into complete works. Remember that you can always scrap whatever you come up with and try again from scratch.

That’s why I half-jokingly suggest that immediately after FAWM, We jump straight into MARM: March Album Rewriting Month.

If you’re game, you can sign up for FAWM here.F

Image by teleguy2; edited by Tozier