Do you ever find yourself feeling uninspired?   Do you have days, or even maybe weeks and months where you’re just not feeling it?

I feel your pain.

Life as a musician can be tough.  It’s sometimes hard to make yourself feel inspired on days when you’re, well, just not feeling it.  For whatever reason. The feeling of inspiration can be an elusive, slippery thing and I’m not sure that you can really make yourself feel inspired any more than you can make yourself feel in love, or make yourself happy or make yourself feel any number of emotions that seem to spontaneously arise when we least expect them to.

However, I would argue that if your goal is to become a great songwriter, musician, composer etc…  looking or waiting for inspiration as a cue that you should get to work is probably going about it the wrong way and in fact if you only write when you’re “feeling it”, you’ll probably end up being a highly un-prolific, un-successful writer.  And although I’m not sure if you can really manufacture inspiration, in my experience there is something you can do that will greatly increase the quality of your music and writing, and in the long term will likely lead to more frequent moments of inspiration.

….and what is that?  

Well, it’s to simply sit down and write music more often.  To get in the habit of writing music on a regular basis.  Ideally, if you’re pursuing this as a profession, every single day.  Regardless of how you feel, or what’s going on in your life, or what challenges you’re dealing with and so on.  If you want to make a living in music you need to carve out time to write and work on music every single day.  In my experience, the more often you do this, the more you force yourself to sit down and work on music, every single day, the more ideas will come. In my experience, the more you simply decide to sit down and work on music, the more moments of inspiration will come and your music will get better and better as a result. And that itself will be inspiring.

To me, when I get in this sort of work flow, it almost feels like I’m instructing my subconscious that OK, we’re doing this.  We are going into music making mode now.  When I do this regularly, like every day for weeks on end, I frequently end up dreaming songs and song ideas, it’s as if my waking life is pouring over into my subconscious and my brain keeps trying to create music even when I go to sleep.  It’s a really cool phenomenon.  But of course, when I stop writing frequently as I sometimes do, it’s like I’m slowly turning the faucet off and the ideas stop occurring as frequently.

Many successful novelists are aware of the importance of developing a consistent routine. For example, Stephen King famously writes a minimum of 1,000 words a day, every single day of the year, rain or shine, whether he’s “feeling it” or not.  He used to write a minimum of 2,000 words a day but at age 73 has slowed down a bit.

The poet W.H. Auden, who is considered one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, had this to say about routine, “Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.”  The author Tim Ferris said this about Auden’s daily routine: “Auden rose shortly after 6:00 a.m., made himself coffee, and settled down to work quickly, perhaps after taking a first pass at the crossword. His mind was sharpest from 7:00 until 11:30 a.m., and he rarely failed to take advantage of these hours. Auden usually resumed his work after lunch and continued into the late afternoon. Cocktail hour began at 6:30 sharp, with the poet mixing himself and any guests several strong vodka martinis. Then dinner was served, with copious amounts of wine, followed by more wine and conversation. Auden went to bed early, never later than 11:00 and, as he grew older, closer to 9:30.”

In my experience in life, doing begets doing, success begets success and taking consistent, inspired action begets more and more moments of inspiration.  It’s great when lightning strikes and you spontaneously feel moments of inspiration.  When it happens, harness those moments to the best of your ability.  But don’t wait around for those moments.  Instead, get up, every day, rain or shine, inspired or not and DO THE WORK.