The 10 Habits of Successful Songwriters
I subscribe to a lot of writing blogs online because I feel that as songwriters, we can learn a thing or two from authors and vice versa.
To demonstrate this, every so often a magazine puts together a list of habits that successful writers share, the kind of thing pulled from years of author interviews.
On this occasion it was an article I saw in Writers Digest titled “7 Habits Of Successful Writers.”
It got me thinking about how much of that advice holds up when you swap “novelist” for “songwriter.” Most of it does, once you translate it into music terms. A few habits needed a rewrite altogether.
So, here’s my version, ten habits (yes, I just had to round it up) worth building if you want to keep writing songs and getting better at it for the long haul.
1. Listen Voraciously
Writers who read outside their genre tend to write better inside it. The same is true for songwriters who only listen to what they write.
If you write country, put on some jazz. If you write pop, spend a week with old soul records. You don’t have to like everything you hear, but you’ll pick up phrasing choices, chord moves, and production ideas you’d never stumble on by staying in your own lane.
The songwriters who keep surprising people are usually the ones pulling from somewhere unexpected.
2. Follow Your Passions, Not the Trend
Chasing whatever’s charting is a losing game, because by the time you’ve written the song, recorded it, and put it out, the sound has already moved on to something else.
Write the song that’s actually in you. It’ll take you longer to finish something you don’t care about, and it’ll show in the final version anyway. The songs that last tend to be the ones the writer needed to write, not the ones aimed at a moving target.
3. Stay Open to Opportunities
A co-write you didn’t plan for. A stranger’s cover of your song that reframes it. A sync opportunity that comes from a random email.
Successful songwriters tend to say yes more often than they say no, at least early on, because you don’t always know where the good stuff is going to come from.
That doesn’t mean saying yes to everything forever. It means staying loose enough to notice when something worthwhile shows up.
4. Take Chances on the First Draft
Don’t edit while you write the first version of a song. Get the rough idea down, even if the second verse is weak or the rhyme is lazy. You can fix all of that later.
What you can’t do is fix a song that never got past the first line because you were too busy second-guessing it. The roughest draft is usually the most honest one, and honesty is easier to shape than a blank page.
5. Switch Gears
Writing the song and being an artist are two different jobs. One happens alone with an instrument or a laptop. The other means gigging it, pitching it, posting about it, and occasionally standing in front of strangers talking about a song you wrote in your bedroom.
A lot of songwriters get uncomfortable the moment they have to switch from one mode to the other. Getting good at both is part of the job now, whether that feels fair or not.
6. Take Time and Care
Not every song needs to be finished this week. Sometimes the best move is to let a line sit for a while instead of forcing a rhyme just to close the verse.
There’s a real difference between output and quality, and the songwriters who last tend to know which one they’re chasing on any given day. A song that sits in a drawer for six months can come back better than the one you rushed out the door.
7. Keep Going
Rejection is part of the deal, whether that’s a gig that falls through, a pitch that goes nowhere, or a song that gets three streams and disappears. Even the songs that eventually do well often got passed over first.
The songwriters who make it through aren’t necessarily the most talented ones in the room. They’re the ones who kept writing after the thing that didn’t work.
8. Write With Other People
Most working songwriters have spent real time in a room with someone else at some point, even if they mostly write solo now.
Co-writing forces you to let go of a line you were attached to, hear someone solve a problem differently than you would have, and move faster than you would alone.
It’s uncomfortable at first. It’s also one of the quickest ways to get better.
9. Finish What You Start
Every songwriter has a folder full of half-written ideas and voice memos that never became songs.
The skill that actually separates people who release music from people who collect ideas is closing the loop: writing the second verse you’re not sold on yet, committing to a bridge instead of leaving it as a question mark forever.
An idea only becomes a song once you finish it.
10. Learn the Mechanics, Not Just the Feeling
You don’t need a music degree, but it helps to understand why a bridge works, what a pre-chorus is doing, why a certain chord change hits the way it does.
Songwriters who only work by feel can write something great by accident, but they struggle to fix a song that isn’t working. Knowing the mechanics means you can diagnose a problem instead of just abandoning the song and starting over.
None of these habits are complicated on their own but the hardest part is doing them consistently.
Have a go at picking up one of these habits at a time and you’ll be surprised how much your songwriting process takes off.
