Songwriting is like.......

......a job that you actually like going to.

It's been two months since FAWM ended, and I've had time to ponder the experience.

FAWM was a success for me this year, because I completed the challenge and then some.

It was a success in more ways, of course. It taught me that if I used some discipline, I could be a prolific songwriter.

I spent every weekend in February (albeit, some were three-day weekends) picking up the guitar and forcing myself to write. While it felt like a burden at times, and while sometimes I cursed myself for getting into this mess, I often found myself actually looking forward to it. Mostly, I guess, because I was eager for the surprise of something being born that had never existed in the world before.

I'm certainly not saying that all sixteen of the songs I wrote were world-shattering. Okay, none of them were. However, in hindsight, I think 10 of the 16 are dang good!

Okay, enough of patting myself on the back.

I also learned that, unless you're some kind of idiot savant, songwriting is WORK. I guess I kinda knew that already, but the FAWM experience really drove it home.

The deal was, with time at a premium, I needed to write a complete song in one day. But yet, it had to be something that I wasn't embarrassed to share with my fellow FAWMers.

My friend, and my new most cherished possession, became a Mead 70-page wide-ruled notebook.

I usually use Microsoft Word to transcribe my lyrics, but let me tell you, there is something about writing stuff out in longhand, with all the scribbles and strike-throughs, that sort of captures one's soul.

I wrote my chord notations next to each line, and played and scribbled and scratched. And I'm never parting with that notebook. A computer program saves things in a nice, sterile, clean, tidy little package. It makes it look as though I just dashed off some dictation, and voila! A song was born!

Ha! Sorry, but no. It was work!

And, you know, that's sorta what I love about songwriting. It's like a puzzle that I know if I work at long enough and smartly enough, I'm going to solve. And nobody is ever going to be able to solve it in the exact same way that I did.

And, silly me, I didn't realize it at the time, but in listening to those 16 songs, there's a bit of me in each one of them. Some of them may be fanciful, but there's at least a tiny bit of "my" truth in every one. I could listen to any one of those songs, had they been written by someone else, and say, I know that life! I lived it! I felt those feelings!

I love songwriting.