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What are the songwriting challenges all about?
Here at the Minnesota Association of Songwriters, as just one of our member benefits, we offer a series of online activities.
One activity is participating in a songwriting challenge.
Writers are given a chance to sign up for a particular challenge. A certain criteria or prompt is given, and songwriters will write using that prompt.
It could be a preselected topic, a title of a song, a specific chord progression, use of a craft technique… anything we feel like throwing at them.
We allow up to 30-days to complete and submit the song.
It's not a contest, race, or competition in anyway. It's a fun exercise, keeping the creative juices flowing.
Besides the writing, members really enjoy seeing what their fellow songwriters have created using the same prompt.
We often include skills presented in a recent craft workshop as part of the challenge. This gives writers a chance to put what they’ve learned to practical use.
What kind of challenges do we offer?
We offer two songwriting challenges: solo songwriting and co-writing challenges.
Solo challenges are as you’d guess. Songwriters write a song by themselves. They have the freedom to come up with whatever they feel for lyrics, or lyrics and music.
While this gives total independence and freedom, it also gives them full responsibility to come up with the song on their own.
In co-writing challenges, writers have two options.
They can prearrange one or more writers to write a song.
Or, as many enjoy doing, they’ll let us randomly match them with one or more writers for the ultimate surprise writing experience.
When are songwriting challenges offered?
We offer co-writing challenges to our members quarterly, with the seasons: Winter, summer, spring and fall.
Solo songwriting challenges are offered between the co-writing intervals. Writers are given a total of eight opportunities to write using our prompts.
Have questions?
If you have any questions about our songwriting challenges, want to find out if we are running a promotion with open sign ups, or have any question about our membership… feel free to e-mail us anytime.
