Daily Songwriter

Somewhere on your phone are voice memos that run forty seconds and stop. Daily Songwriter gives you one word a day and ten minutes to write about it. You can write. That was never the problem. What goes missing is a reason to start today, and evidence that you have been showing up. THE TEN MINUTES The word is a concrete thing. Screen door. Rust. Floorboard. Never love, never time: you cannot smell those. You start the timer and write without stopping to think, fix, rhyme or judge. Not what the word means: what it weighs, what it smells like, what it sounds like when it closes. Every sense you have, including the two nobody counts: balance, and where your body is. Most of what comes out is scaffolding, and that is the job. You are making the material a song gets built out of, and the only way to the two lines with a pulse is to write past the forty that do not. The timer stops and you…