My phone is full of voice memos. My notebooks are full of lyric fragments, half-finished ideas and possible song titles scrawled at odd hours and my hard drives are full of WIP (works in progress) demos from DAW sessions that may never become finished songs.
I never delete any of it, that is not until an idea has been properly explored and either used or genuinely exhausted.
That’s not what I would call hoarding. That’s how I write.
For me, the very act of capturing an idea and moving it from head and heart to an external medium, whether that’s onto paper, into a phone or onto a hard drive, is a legitimate and important part of the songwriting process.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, partly because of a short but pointed piece over at Writer’s Digest, an author spotlight on journalist and novelist Sheila Yasmin Marikar, published to coincide with the release of her new novel Incidentals.
When asked for one piece of advice for other writers, she said this: “Don’t be precious about your process. Write on your phone, on a scrap of paper, on whatever you have on hand, for whatever time you’ve got — five minutes or 50, an hour or 10. It all adds up.”
It’s advice aimed at fiction writers. But it maps almost perfectly onto songwriting and in some ways, songwriters need to hear this piece of advice more than anyone.
Because here’s the thing: there’s a version of songwriting that lives in our heads, and it looks something like this…
“A quiet afternoon, your favourite guitar in your hands, a pot of coffee going, no interruptions, the right mood settling over you like a warm blanket. Now you can write.”
The problem? That version of songwriting is a fantasy. And waiting for it is quietly killing your songs.
What “Being Precious” Actually Looks Like
You probably recognise the behaviour, even if you haven’t named it. It sounds like: I’ll write when I have a proper block of time. I can’t work on lyrics without my guitar in front of me. I’m not in the right headspace today. I need to be at my desk, in my studio, with everything set up properly.
Songwriters are particularly vulnerable to this kind of thinking, and it’s not hard to see why. The mythology around songwriting is rich and romantic.
Songs are supposed to arrive whole, like gifts from some higher place. The great ones were written in twenty minutes of inspired frenzy, or so the stories go. So when the muse hasn’t shown up and your setup isn’t right and you’ve only got half an hour before you need to pick the kids up, it’s easy to conclude that today just isn’t the day.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: preciousness is usually fear wearing a disguise. If the conditions are never quite right, you never have to sit down and find out whether the song is any good. The precious mindset is protective.
It’s also completely counterproductive.
Your Phone Is Your Scrap of Paper
This is the practical heart of Marikar’s advice, and it’s the habit that separates prolific songwriters from occasional ones.
Your phone’s voice memo app is one of the most powerful songwriting tools you own, and most people use it about ten percent as much as they should.
A melody that surfaces while you’re making breakfast. A lyric line that comes to you on the drive home. A chord progression you stumble across while noodling at midnight. These moments are real but they are also fleeting.
The voice memo app is there specifically for them.
Here’s the key thing to understand: a voice memo is not a demo. It does not have to sound good. It does not have to be complete. It just has to exist.
Humming a rough melody into your phone with the TV on in the background counts. Muttering a lyric idea while you’re walking the dog counts. The standard for capture is zero, if the idea is in your phone, you’ve done your job in that moment.
The same goes for your notes app and a lyric fragment, a phrase that interests you, an image that stopped you, a line you overheard that felt like it belonged in a song. Drop it in. Don’t evaluate it yet.
You’re not writing songs at this point, you’re collecting raw material.
Short Sessions Are Legitimate Sessions
There’s a widespread belief among songwriters (me, definitely included) that if you don’t have a decent chunk of time available, there’s no point sitting down at all.
Well, this belief is wrong, and it’s costing you songs.
Think about what you can actually get done in fifteen or twenty minutes of focused attention. You can rewrite a clunky line that’s been bothering you for a week. You can try three different approaches to a chorus melody. You can work out the chord movement in a bridge that isn’t sitting right. You can take a voice memo fragment and push it one step further toward being a real song.
None of that requires two hours and a cleared schedule. It requires fifteen minutes and a willingness to show up.
The compounding effect here is real. A songwriter who works on their craft for twenty minutes every day will, over weeks and months, produce significantly more finished work than the one who waits for the perfect three-hour window that comes around once a month.
Consistency beats intensity over the long run, every time.
Start treating small windows of time as writing sessions in their own right rather than warm-up time that doesn’t count.
Separate the Writing From the Production
Home recording has been one of the great developments in music. The ability to produce professional-quality work from your own space is genuinely remarkable. But it has also, for many songwriters, created an unintended problem.
When your studio setup is always there and always available, it can start to feel like that’s where songwriting happens. And if you’re not at your DAW, with your interface running and your plugins loaded and your monitors on, you’re not really working. You’re just messing around.
This is a trap. The song (the actual song, the very thing that matters) exists before any of that. Melody, lyric, structure, emotional core: none of it requires a single piece of gear. It requires your attention and a way to capture what comes.
Writing away from your instrument entirely is worth trying as a deliberate practice. When you’re not managing chord shapes or production decisions, you think differently. You think more like a writer and less like a musician, and that shift can unlock lyric ideas and melodic approaches that the studio mindset tends to close off.
Lyrics in particular can be worked on anywhere. Commutes, waiting rooms, lunch breaks, the ten minutes before a meeting starts, all of these are legitimate writing environments if you’re willing to treat them that way.
Build a Raw Material Library
Professional songwriters (you know, the ones consistently producing good work) tend not to sit down and write songs from scratch in a single session. What they actually do is maintain a running stock of raw material: fragments, phrases, images, emotional observations, melodic ideas, rhythmic patterns.
When they sit down to write, they’re drawing from that library as much as they’re generating new ideas in the moment. You can do exactly the same thing.
Keep a running notes file on your phone where you drop anything that feels like it might belong in a song one day. An interesting turn of phrase. A feeling you want to capture but haven’t found the words for yet. A conversation fragment that had an unusual rhythm to it.
Maybe a personal experience that still has some unresolved emotional charge.
Most of what goes into that file will never become a song. That’s fine, that’s how it works. But some of it will, and the ones that do will be richer for the fact that they came from something real and specific rather than manufactured on demand.
The mental shift here is significant: you’re not waiting for inspiration to arrive fully formed. You’re actively farming it, all the time, with whatever tools you have on hand.
Lower the Bar to Raise the Output
There’s a psychological function to lowering the stakes in the moment of capture, and it’s worth being deliberate about it.
When you pick up your phone to hum a melody idea, tell yourself: this is just a voice memo. When you jot a lyric fragment in your notes app, tell yourself: this is just a rough thought. When you sit down for fifteen minutes between other things, tell yourself: this is just a short session, no pressure.
Now, this isn’t self-deception. It’s removing the weight of expectation from the moment of creation, which is exactly when that weight does the most damage. The idea that every writing session needs to produce something finished and polished is one of the most effective ways to ensure that nothing gets written at all.
Giving yourself permission to write badly, to capture the ugly, unfinished, half-baked version of an idea, is the gateway to eventually writing well. The bad version can be improved. The idea you never captured can’t.
The Songs You Showed Up For
Here’s what it comes down to: the songs you finish are the ones you showed up for, even when the conditions weren’t perfect. Especially when they weren’t perfect.
I can’t tell you how many finished songs I have that started life as a barely audible voice memo, a scribble in a notebook, or a rough DAW sketch that sat on a hard drive for months before I knew what it wanted to be. The idea didn’t arrive complete. It arrived as a fragment, a feeling, a direction.
The capturing came first. The song came later.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about maintaining a library of raw material, you don’t always know which ideas are the important ones until much later. Something you hummed into your phone on a Tuesday afternoon with no particular expectation might turn out to be the emotional centre of a song you write six months from now.
You won’t know unless you kept it. So keep it.
Your process is not a sacred ritual. It’s a tool and like any tool, it works best when you actually pick it up, whatever it looks like in that moment, wherever you happen to be.
Voice memo, notebook, napkin, notes app. It all counts. None of it is too rough, too incomplete or too small to be worth keeping.
So take Marikar’s advice to heart. Write on your phone, write on a scrap of paper, write in the fifteen minutes you have before dinner, write in the notes app at 11pm when you should probably be asleep.
Write badly, write roughly, write incompletely. And then keep it (yes, all of it) because you genuinely never know which fragment is the one that becomes something great in your song.
Source: https://www.writersdigest.com/sheila-yasmin-marikar-dont-be-precious-about-your-process
