Guest post by Sammy Hakim. This article originally appeared on Soundfly’s Flypaper.

You’re sitting down in your home studio with a cup of coffee in your hand, and your guitar on your lap, and it hits you: writer’s block. Rather than power through it, it makes more sense to take a day off and find a way to get re-inspired, right?

Wrong.

Ask any writer in Nashville and you’ll quickly find out that waiting for inspiration can be a quick death to your career as a songwriter. In fact, even in the Los Angeles and New York markets, writers can often have between one and four co-writing sessions a day — meaning that if they can’t write, they might not be paid.

So how do you train yourself to be able to write a song a day?