I was sitting with my thoughts the other night and I found myself turning over a question I hadn’t really examined in a long time. I was thinking about creativity. Specifically, I was thinking about the different ways we humans express it, and why some creative pursuits feel more rewarding than others.
Now, I know it’s a completely subjective line of thinking, what satisfies one person creatively might leave another cold, and that’s fine. But the question kept pulling at me: why does songwriting, of all the things I do, give back to me more than it takes out of me?
And not just marginally more. Significantly more.
This is my attempt to answer this question properly and I think it has something to do with the nature of the challenge itself.
Not All Creative Pursuits Are Built the Same
When I started mapping out the different forms of human creative expression (painting, sculpture, writing, photography, dance, poetry, filmmaking just to name a few of them) what struck me was how differently each one structures the relationship between effort and reward.
Some creative pursuits offer relatively immediate feedback. For instance, a painter can make a mark, step back, and see something. A photographer frames a shot and knows almost instantly whether it’s working.
The feedback loop is tight, and there’s a kind of satisfaction available at almost every stage of the process.
Other pursuits are more deferred. An example of this is a novelist might spend years before they have something they can evaluate as a whole. The satisfaction is real, but it’s rationed out in small doses over a long timeline.
Songwriting sits in an interesting position in this spectrum. It has the intimacy of poetry, the structural demands of architecture, the time-sensitivity of performance, and the emotional directness of music all compressed into something that in most cases runs under five minutes.
That compression is part of what makes it so demanding, and also part of what makes completing a song feel so worthwhile.
But there’s more to it than just structure. What I kept coming back to, is that the difficulty of songwriting isn’t incidental. It’s fundamental. And that’s probably the whole point of it all.
The Blank Page Isn’t Neutral
Every songwriter knows the feeling. You sit down with the intention of writing something, and the silence just sits back and looks at you.
That blank page (or blank session in your DAW, or empty notebook) isn’t passive. It has its own gravity that pulls you toward comfort. Towards the chord progression you’ve played a thousand times. Towards the phrase that sounds poetic but on closer inspection says nothing and towards the familiar, the safe, the already-done.
Fighting that pull is the first act of the whole process, and it takes real courage. The courage of choosing discomfort on purpose because you know something is there if you keep going.
Every other creative form has its version of this moment. But in songwriting, that resistance doesn’t really go away. It shifts shape. First it’s the blank page, then it’s the chorus that won’t quite work, then it’s the lyric that’s almost right but not quite.
The resistance is a constant companion throughout the whole songwriting process, not just at the start. Learning to work alongside it, rather than waiting for it to leave, is one of the things the craft teaches you over time.
The Simultaneous Constraint Problem
Here’s what I think makes songwriting genuinely unique among creative pursuits: it requires you to satisfy multiple demanding constraints at the same time.
A melody that people can follow and remember, a lyric that earns its place in the song rather than just filling space, a rhythmic structure that breathes, an emotional arc that takes the listener somewhere and brings them back.
And then the whole thing has to feel, when it’s done, like it couldn’t have existed any other way.
A novelist can follow a character and see where they lead. A painter can sketch loosely and see something emerge organically. But a song has to do all of its work simultaneously, and the different elements have to support each other rather than pull in different directions.
Melody and lyric have to want to be together. Structure and emotion have to agree on where the song is going.
Solving those sets of constraints is one of the more satisfying things I know how to do. And it’s satisfying because it’s hard. Easy things don’t give back much. Things that make genuine demands on you do.
Every Song Teaches You Something Different
One of the things I’ve noticed after years of writing songs is that the challenges you face changes every single time.
The thing that defeats you on one song say, a bridge that won’t resolve, a first verse that’s too expository, a chorus that peaks too early, teaches you exactly the thing you need to handle it differently on the next one.
This means you’re never really just writing a song. You’re also building something that belongs only to you: a set of instincts, an internal compass for what works and what doesn’t, a personal vocabulary for how you want music to feel.
No two songwriters develop the same compass. Your specific history of attempts, failures, partial successes, and hard-won breakthroughs produces something nobody else has.
In an environment where creative tools are more accessible than ever, where templates and AI can generate starting points for almost anything, the thing that remains irreducibly yours is the sensibility you’ve built through years of showing up and doing the difficult work.
Songwriting, more than most pursuits, is where that sensibility gets forged.
The Song Finds the Thing Underneath the Thing
This is the part I find hardest to explain to people who haven’t experienced it, but it might be the most important thing about why songwriting rewards you so well.
You sit down to write about a specific thing like a conversation you had, a feeling you’re carrying, a memory you keep returning to, and somewhere in the process, usually when you’re deep enough into it that your defences are down, the song finds something else.
Something that’s underneath the obvious subject. Sometimes it’s something you haven’t consciously admitted to yourself yet.
For me, it happens in the second verse more often than anywhere else, in my experience. The first verse establishes, and then the second verse, if you’re writing honestly, starts to ask why.
And the answer that comes out isn’t always the one you expected.
This diagnostic quality of songwriting as a tool for self-understanding rather than just self-expression, only becomes available when you push through the resistance.
If you stay on the surface, you get surface songs, but if you keep asking what the song is actually about, and you’re willing to follow the answer wherever it leads, you end up somewhere absolutely true.
That journey, from the surface subject to the real one, is one of the most rewarding things the craft offers.
The Reward Is Yours Regardless of Who’s Listening
Here’s something I’ve come to believe fairly firmly: the reward of finishing a song doesn’t scale with the size of the audience.
When you complete something there’s a satisfaction that’s almost physical. You made something that didn’t exist before. You called it into being from nothing. That’s not contingent on anyone else hearing it, or liking it, or sharing it.
This is worth saying clearly because the noise around music these days is almost entirely about reach. Streams, followers, algorithm performance, discoverability.
Now, all of that is real and has its place. But if you make the external outcome the primary reason you write, you’re outsourcing the reward to other people’s responses, and that’s a fragile place to operate from.
The internal completion, the moment you know a song is done and it’s honest and it’s yours, that’s the thing that actually sustains a writing practice over years and decades.
The rest is just icing on the cake.
What to Leave Out
One of the hardest skills in songwriting, and one that takes the longest to develop, is knowing what to leave out.
A three-minute song can carry the emotional weight of something much larger, not because it explains everything, but because it knows what it doesn’t need to say. The right detail, in the right place, does more work than a paragraph of explanation.
A single image can contain a whole relationship. A half-finished thought can leave space for the listener to bring something of their own.
Learning to make those choices which is to ask what’s truly essential and to cut everything else, is a discipline that transfers well beyond music. It trains you to think about what a moment actually requires.
What does this need to say? What can be trusted to the listener? Where is the filler hiding That compression instinct, once you’ve developed it through songwriting, shows up in how you write, how you communicate, how you make decisions.
It’s one of the quieter gifts the craft gives you, and it’s one most people don’t think to mention when they talk about what songwriting teaches.
The Challenge and the Reward Are the Same Thing
I want to come back to where I started, sitting in the quiet, turning this question over.
When I mapped out different creative pursuits and asked which ones feel most rewarding, what I kept arriving at was this: the ones that demand the most of you, consistently and without apology, give back the most.
Not despite the difficulty but because of it.
Without the songs that collapse in the second verse, or the choruses that never ignite, or the lyrics that miss the real feeling… the ones that do work wouldn’t mean anything. The struggle isn’t something you pass through on the way to the reward.
It’s where the reward actually lives.
Songwriting is uniquely positioned to deliver this, because it never stops asking for more. There’s no point at which you’ve fully solved it. Every new song is a new problem. Every new problem is a new chance to find out what you’re capable of.
And every time you finish something honest, something real, something that didn’t exist before you made it, you get to feel, like the whole project of making music is worth exactly what it costs.
For me, songwriting is definitely the most rewarding creative pursuit I know. Subjectively, completely, and without much qualification.
That’s where the thinking landed me, anyways. What do you think? What does songwriting mean to you and why do you do it?
Peace,
Corey 🙂
