Morning Pages – A routine to boost your Songwriting
Hi all, I’m finally back writing this blog again after taking a couple of months off. I tried to spend my summer holidays offline as much as possible this year since I felt it was needed to clear my mind effectively.
It’s usually easier for me to be focused, inspired and relaxed when staying away from online or all electronic devices. And I must say it surely helped. It’s so easy to get lost online and think or do too much everyday so you cannot really slow down and relax.
And for me too much thoughts in my head means problems with songwriting and creativity in general. So instead of spending time doing stuff online I focused my energy on writing music during the summer. And I probably wrote more music than ever during these few months, sweet!
I’ve been also been busy with writing down this songwriting guide for beginners. I’m trying to collect all songwriting resources I’ve writing into this Songwriting 101 -summary page.
How to start your days effectively
Writing lots of music wasn’t only because of staying offline. I have on pretty good tool to boost my songwriting which I’m going to share with you now. I have one daily writing routine that I’ve been doing for almost couple of years now. It’s called Morning Pages.
Morning pages routine, or exercise if you want to call it that way, is pretty simple. You wake up, take a shower or whatever your morning routines are, and go straight to your working desk and set a timer for 10 minutes. And then write.
No thinking, no planning, no editing. Just writing. Stop immediately after 10 minutes and repeat day after continuously. The key is just to start writing every day. As a first thing in a morning.
My mind is not on the songwriting mode by default but with the help of morning pages I make sure I start my days concentrating on things I believe are important. There are always some days when I don’t have time, motivation or energy to write music but when I start a day with the help of morning pages I definitely make sure I write something every day.
And that’s really important for me to get stuff done in a long run. It’s easier to take days off when there’s no pressure. I’ll write something everyday because of my morning pages routine so there’s no need to worry.
Even if it’s only couple of pages. 5 to 10 minutes of writing for a day is much better than no writing at all and it actually feels good to know you write something everyday. And the trick is that morning pages usually boosts your writing mode for the rest of the day.
When I start my days with the large glass of cold water and 10 minutes of writing I think about the music and songwriting much more during the day compared to days when I’m not following my morning pages routine. And surprise surprise, I usually end up writing a lot more than few pages during the day including music.
Another writing routine – Object writing
There are different techniques for morning pages if you need more ideas or a change sometimes. One trick I use is called Object Writing. You might be familiar with it if from various songwriting books.
Object writing is about selecting one theme or word and trying to describe it with the help of your senses. How does it sound like, how do you feel around it, what does it look like and stuff like that.
Sometimes it’s really easy to write 10 minutes and get inspired without any help but sometimes it’s really nice to pick one random word and write about that. I use object writing on those sleepy and moody mornings to get me going easier.
I’ll write separate post on how I use Object Writing as a tool to boost my songwriting later.
Morning pages helps you to write better songs
So as you can see there are several ways to write your morning pages and all are fine as long as you keep start and keep your routine. Morning pages makes you a better songwriter when practiced repeatedly.
It’s not only about getting the songwriter mood on. With the help of morning pages you learn to start writing faster. You learn to focus on writing better. No excuses or waiting for inspiration. Inspiration is a good thing but it’s not always needed for writing.
And most importantly you write more. It doesn’t really matter what you write. You’ll always learn from it.
So give it a try during next week and let me know how it went. I’m mostly active on social media so ping me there on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook!