Last November I had a couple of friends who participated in National Novel Writing Month. Their goal? To write a 175-page (around 50,000 word) novel in 30 days. The idea is to fight creativity’s worst enemy, self-editing:

By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down. (nanowrimo.org)

I wanted to participate, but didn’t care to write a novel. So I made up my own version - National Album Writing Month. The goal was to attack my bent towards self-editing, jump-start my songwriting, and write 9 songs in a month.

Here is one of the songs I wrote last November. It’s about some good friends of mine (the lyrics are here):

I ended up writing 6 songs, so I didn’t quite hit my goal, but it definitely got me back into song-writing (it had been over a year since I’d written) so I’m calling it a win.

I’d love to hear your feedback, and would love even more to hear music from other songwriters who might have stumbled onto this post.