Day one. Today's word is
Screen door
List ten images screen door pulls up. Pick the three that surprise you and put them in a chorus.
You get one concrete word a day. You set ten minutes going and write about it without stopping, using every sense you have. Most of what comes out is scaffolding, and that is the job. You are making material, not a song.
Above the ten minutes sits a ladder of rungs that take the raw material toward a finished song. Ten minutes keeps the streak. Everything above it is offered and never expected.
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.
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Day twoRust
Write about rust using only what you could hear if the lights went out.
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Day threeCoffee cup
Put coffee cup in the first line and never mention it again.
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Day sevenFloorboard
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 rung, 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 rungs are what you do about it.
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Mine it
Read back what you wrote. Most of it is scaffolding. Find the three lines with a pulse and write them out again.
Ten minutes usually yields one line worth keeping. Three is a good day.
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Find the hook
One of those three is the song. Say each one out loud. The one you want to hear again is the title.
A hook is the line the rest of the song has to earn.
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Build
Write the verse that arrives at your hook. The hook itself stays out of it.
A verse that already says the chorus leaves the chorus nothing to do.
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Shape
Sketch the order. Where does it repeat, and what has changed by the time it comes back?
Repetition is not laziness. It is the thing the listener came for.
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Sing it
Sing what you have, badly, out loud. Follow the note that wants to move, then write down what the melody did.
You cannot hear a melody by reading it. Nobody can.
The rungs never count toward anything. Only the ten minutes counts, because the moment a rung counts, ten minutes stops feeling like enough.
It will not write your song for you.
There is no AI in Daily Songwriter. Not as a feature, not as a smart suggestion, not later. A machine will hand you a hundred lines about a screen door in a second, and not one of them is the line about your mother catching the door before it slammed, every time, for forty years.
That line costs ten minutes and it has to be yours. The app gives you a word and then it gets out of the way.
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 or your Mac, 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. You can export everything you have written, any time, and take it somewhere else.
What it costs
The practice is free. It stays free.
Free, forever
- The word, every day
- A second word on the days the first one will not go anywhere
- The ten minutes, the timer and the page
- The whole track, in order, start to finish
- Your run, your history and reminders if you want them
- Everything you write, kept and exportable
- The first rung of the ladder, Mine it
One purchase
- The rest of the ladder: Find the hook, Build, Shape, Sing it
- The direction fork, and the thirty-six directions behind it
- The Song, where a sketch outlives the day that started it
- Song export
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. Export first if you want to keep it.
- 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 rest of the ladder, the part that takes what you wrote toward a finished song. 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.
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