Weekly Challenges

Note

Since 2021, weekly song prompts for both the FAWM and 50/90 challenges have been posted to social media accounts. Namely Instagram, YouTube, and Mastodon.

You can scroll through those archives to look for inspiration from past event.

Weekly Challenges are ideas for you to consider when you’re thinking of what you’re going to write next. Think of them as a creative starting point for a writing session rather than as a competition. The prompt might be a lyrical one (for example, try writing in the poetic form known as a villanelle) or a musical one (use a descending chord progression)

How you interpret the prompt is up to you, but if it suggests that you write something in an odd time signature, sticking to 4/4 isn’t really going to fit the bill.

Listening to what other people have created in response to the same prompt that you’ve tackled might give you interesting ideas for alternative ways of approaching songwriting in the future. When you submit your song, the website gives you the option to mark it as a response to one of the weekly challenges. Doing this will help other fawmers who have accepted the challenge to find your song and—if they want—comment on it.

But please don’t feel that you have to listen to every other song submitted for a challenge that you’ve entered. Back in the early days of FAWM people tended to do this (after all, it’s fun, and supportive, and people like being polite) but the number of people taking part in FAWM these days makes this too much to ask.