Screen door

The practice

Ten minutes is the whole requirement.

The practice is object writing. You take one concrete thing, a screen door, a coffee cup, rust, and you write about it for ten minutes without stopping to think, fix, rhyme or judge. You go at it with every sense you have, including the two nobody counts: your sense of balance, and your sense of where your body is.

You do not stop because a line is bad. Bad lines are most of it. You are not writing a song, you are making the material a song gets built out of, and the only way to reach the two lines with a pulse in them is to write past the forty that do not.

The timer runs out, you close it, and you have done the thing for today. That is the entire requirement, and it is the same requirement on the good days.

The ten minutes

A timer, the word, and a page.

You write inside the app. There is nothing on the screen but the word you are writing about and the page you are writing on, because anything else is somewhere for your attention to go.

The track

The word comes with one small instruction.

The words are authored in an order, and no two of the same kind sit next to each other. None of them is an abstraction like love or time, because you cannot smell those. The instruction underneath changes shape from day to day, so the practice does not calcify into one move you get good at.

• Day two
  Rust

  Write about rust using only what you could hear if the lights went out.

• Day three
  Coffee cup

  Put coffee cup in the first line and never mention it again.

• Day seven
  Floorboard

  Floorboard is the last thing in the song. Write backwards from it.

Three real days from the shipped track. The whole track is free, in order, from the first day to the last. On a day the word will not go anywhere, you can ask for a second one, and the first comes back to you later rather than being spent.

After the ten minutes

Some days you keep going.

Read back what you wrote and most of it is scaffolding. Somewhere in it are two or three lines with a pulse, and one of those is a song. Finding it is the first step, and it takes about five minutes.

Illustration, not somebody's page. Three lines mined out of a ten minutes on screen door, with the one worth keeping in full ink.

• Grey mesh gone soft where the dog put his head through for years.
• Rust in the corners the colour of coffee left in a cup.
• You can hear who is coming by how the door lets go of them.

That third line is a title. The next four steps are what you do about it.

1. Mine it

   Read back what you wrote. Most of it is scaffolding. Tap the three lines with a pulse, and tidy them underneath if they need it.

   Ten minutes usually yields one line worth keeping. Three is a good day.

2. Put somebody in it

   Put somebody in front of what you just wrote about. Who are they, and what happened just before? Then write the one line that says why they are still standing there.

   Ten minutes of object writing hands you a room. It does not hand you anybody standing in it, and that is the part a song is about.

3. Sort it

   Split everything you have into two lists. In one, the things you could photograph. In the other, the things you think or feel.

   The first list is a verse. The second is a chorus. Almost nobody comes out of ten minutes with enough of the second.

4. Write the chorus

   Tap the line you most want to hear again. That is your title. Build four lines around it, and finish them before you write anything else.

   Without a chorus you do not have a song. Everything else gets written to arrive here.

5. Build the verse

   Now the verse. Tap the pictures you want and write from them, saying nothing the chorus is going to say.

   A verse that already says the chorus leaves the chorus nothing to do.

6. Shape

   Sketch the order. Where does it repeat, and what has changed by the time it comes back? Then pick one place to break the pattern on purpose.

   Repetition is what the listener came for. Contrast is how you keep them.

7. Sing it

   Sing what you have out loud, badly. Where the words fight the tune, sing nonsense and follow the melody instead. Then catch what the nonsense turned into, because some of it arrives as words you did not plan.

   You cannot hear a melody by reading it. Nobody can.

The steps never count toward anything. Only the ten minutes counts, because the moment a step counts, ten minutes stops feeling like enough.

Over time

Miss a day and pick up where you left off.

Two days missed · the run held · run of 22

Miss a day and nothing happens to your run. Miss more than that and the run is not lost, it is held at its number for another week while you get back. Write inside that window and it resumes and keeps counting.

Nothing here scolds you. No notification arrives to tell you what you broke, no number turns red, and nothing you already did stops counting because of a bad Tuesday. The track is an order rather than a calendar, so day twelve comes after day eleven whenever you get to it.

Where it lives

It stays on your device.

There are no accounts and there is no server. What you write never leaves your phone, and there is nothing for us to see even if we wanted to.

The App Store privacy label says Data Not Collected. That is a description of the app rather than an argument about it.

What it costs

The practice is free. It stays free.

Free, you write every day and keep the lines worth keeping. Paid, you turn them into songs. One purchase, not a subscription, and there is nothing else to buy.

Where this comes from

The practice is Pat Pattison's.

Object writing is Pat Pattison's. He teaches it at Berklee and sets it down in Writing Better Lyrics, which is where to go for the whole method rather than ten minutes of it.

Daily Songwriter does not rename it, does not claim it and is not affiliated with him or with Berklee. It is a timer, a word and somewhere to put the writing, built for the part of the method you are supposed to do every day and mostly do not.

Questions

Questions.

Do I lose my streak if I miss a day?

No. A run holds through a lapse, and the app tells you how long it holds for. You pick up where you left off.

What if the word does not land today?

Ask for a second one. The first is not spent, it comes back to you later in the track. A coffee cup you cannot face on a Tuesday might be exactly the thing in November.

Where does my writing go if I delete the app?

It is stored on your device, so deleting the app deletes it. Settings has an Export that writes everything you have written to a file you can keep anywhere, so take one before you delete anything.

What does the purchase include?

The daily word, the ten minutes, the whole track, your history and everything you write are free forever. One purchase opens the last five steps, the part that builds the song around what you found, and songs, which hold the days that fed them and every draft you keep. It is a single purchase, not a subscription, and there is nothing else to buy.

Is object writing yours?

No. It is Pat Pattison's, taught at Berklee and set down in Writing Better Lyrics, which is where to go for the whole method rather than ten minutes of it.

Do I need to read music or know theory?

No. Nothing here teaches you chords. It assumes you can already write and that the problem is starting.

Support

Something broken, a question, or an idea.

On iPhone. The daily practice is free.