Rainer Maria Rilke once issued a challenge. He wrote:
“There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, ‘I must,’ then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge.”
Rilke was a poet. One of the great ones. But this isn’t really about poetry.
It’s really about anyone who creates. More specifically, it’s about you, if you write songs because what Rilke is describing here cuts straight through every excuse, every distraction, and every surface-level motivation, and lands on the one question that actually matters.
Must I write?
What Rilke Was Actually Saying
Before you can apply this to songwriting, it helps to know what he was really getting at.
Rilke wasn’t telling you to dig deep as a pep talk. He wasn’t trying to inspire you. He was asking you to be honest with yourself, which is a much harder thing.
The core of what he’s saying is this: there is a fundamental difference between wanting to write and needing to write. Between writing because it sounds like a good idea and writing because the alternative is unthinkable.
“Go within” sounds vague. It isn’t. It means stripping away everything external, the opinions, the goals, the identity you’ve built around being a songwriter and asking what’s actually left underneath.
Does the urge survive that stripping? Or does it quietly disappear when nobody’s watching?
That’s the test. And most people avoid taking it, because they’re not entirely sure they’ll like the answer.
The Shallow Roots Problem
Rilke asks whether your writing stretches its roots into the deepest place of your heart.
That metaphor is worth sitting with. Roots at depth hold through storms. Roots near the surface look fine until the conditions get difficult and then they don’t hold at all.
Shallow roots in songwriting are easy to spot once you know what you’re looking for.
Writing to impress other songwriters. Chasing a sound that’s currently getting streams. Needing validation from peers before you trust your own work. Producing songs that tick the boxes without actually saying anything.
None of that is a moral failing. It’s just human but it produces a particular kind of song… one that feels assembled rather than felt.
Listeners pick up on this, even when they can’t articulate why. They feel the absence of something. They just can’t name it.
The honest question Rilke is really asking is: why are you actually writing?
Not the answer you’d give in an interview. Not the version that sounds meaningful. The real one. The one that’s true at midnight when nobody’s asking.
The Question Itself
Rilke says to ask it in the most silent hour of your night. That’s deliberate.
The daytime is full of noise. Other people’s opinions. The scroll. The comparison. The inbox. All of it drowns out the quieter signal that’s trying to come through.
The silent hour is the only time you can actually hear yourself think and in that silence, most people discover there are three possible answers to “must I write?”
The first is I want to. Wanting is fine. Wanting is how most things start. But want is conditional. Want fades when the going gets difficult. Want disappears when the reward isn’t showing up.
The second is I should. Should is even shakier. Should is external pressure wearing the mask of internal conviction. It might keep you writing for a while, but it won’t sustain you through the long stretches where nothing is working and nobody is paying attention.
The third is I must. The “I must” doesn’t feel romantic. It’s not a warm, inspiring sensation. It’s closer to a compulsion.
It’s the thing that pulls you back to writing even when the last session was a failure. The thing that makes not writing feel like a slow leak, like something important is going wrong the longer you stay away from it.
When that’s your answer, you know it. It doesn’t require convincing.
Think about the songwriters who clearly operated from that place.
Bob Dylan writing obsessively through the early sixties, producing more than anyone around him, driven by something he couldn’t have fully explained.
Joni Mitchell treating songwriting as a form of self-surgery, returning to it across decades regardless of where the industry stood on her.
Johnny Cash writing all the way to the end, his voice stripped bare, still needing to put things into songs.
These weren’t people who wrote because it seemed like a good idea. They wrote because the alternative wasn’t really available to them.
That’s the “I must” Rilke is talking about.
Your Life as a Testimony
Rilke’s final line is the one that gets overlooked.
He says that if writing is your necessity, then your life, even the mundane, unremarkable, ordinary parts of it, must become a testimony to that urge.
That’s a significant claim. It’s not just saying “write a lot.” It’s saying that when writing is genuine necessity, it shapes the way you move through everything else. You start living like a songwriter all the time, not just when you’re sitting with a guitar or a notepad.
You notice differently. A conversation takes on weight. A drive through a neighbourhood you’ve driven through a hundred times suddenly has something in it worth paying attention to. A feeling that you might have previously ignored gets examined instead, turned over, held up to the light.
Nothing is wasted. That’s what Rilke is pointing at. The ordinary hours feed the work, even when it doesn’t look like they’re doing anything at all.
This connects to something I’ve written about before, the idea of songwriting as practice. The sessions that produce nothing still matter. The quiet days of observation still matter. The life lived attentively still matters. Because all of it is accumulating underneath the surface, and at some point it finds its way into the work.
A songwriter who lives this way isn’t waiting for inspiration to arrive from somewhere else. They’ve understood that the material is already everywhere. They just need to keep paying attention.
What If You’re Not Sure?
Here’s something worth saying plainly: Rilke’s question is not a trap.
If you sit with “must I write?” and you can’t yet answer with certainty, that’s not a verdict against you. That uncertainty is actually the point of the exercise.
It’s the beginning of an honest conversation with yourself, not the end of one.
There are songwriters who know from early on that writing is their necessity. There are others who discover it slowly, through years of returning to the work before they fully understand why they keep returning. Both are valid paths.
If you’re not sure, a few things are worth trying. Write without any external purpose for a season, no posting, no sharing, no feedback, just write to see what comes out when there’s no audience and no reward.
Pay attention to what pulls at you. Notice what you keep coming back to even when you’ve told yourself you’re done for the day. Keep track of the moments when not writing feels like the worse option.
It’s also worth being honest about the difference between a creative dry spell and a deeper uncertainty about the calling. Dry spells happen to everyone, even the most compelled writers go through periods where nothing comes easily.
That’s not evidence that the “I must” has left. It’s just part of the work.
But if writing has always felt more like an obligation you’ve taken on than a necessity you can’t escape, it’s worth sitting with that honestly. There’s no shame in it. Rilke isn’t trying to disqualify you. He’s trying to help you find out what’s true.
Build Your Life Upon It
Rilke ends with a simple instruction: if the answer is yes, build your life upon it.
Not your career. Not your output goals. Your life.
That’s a big ask. But it’s an honest one. Because what he’s really saying is that the “I must” isn’t something you can keep in a separate compartment marked “creative life” and take out on weekends. It runs through everything, or it doesn’t run at all.
The songs that last, the ones that find people years after they were written and still mean something, are almost always the ones that had to be written. You can hear it in them. The necessity.
The fact that they came from somewhere real and went somewhere real and didn’t particularly care whether anyone approved.
That’s what Rilke is pointing at. Not success. Not output. Not even craft, at least not here. Just the truth of the thing. Whether it’s real or not.
So find your quiet hour. Ask the question. Dig down past the want and the should and the identity and the goals, and find out what’s actually there.
If the answer comes back as “I must,” then you know what to do.
Build on it.
