Inspiration hits Swift at random points: She jots notes in the car or at diners; she writes songs on trampolines.
But anxiety is integral to how she creates. "It's starting," she told reporters backstage at the CMA Music Festival in Nashville last June. "All the anxiety is starting. When the anxiety starts, the writing happens right after, usually."
It makes sense, then, that most of her biggest hits have come out of emotional conflicts. Her first No. 1 hit, "Love Story," was written in an anxious fit. She was mad at her parents because they wouldn't allow her to date some guy when she was 17, so she "ran to my room and wrote a song on my bedroom floor called 'Love Story.' So that turned into something that I never expected to be our first No. 1 worldwide hit."
But even though songs come in fits and starts, the whole album takes a long time. She sets aside two years at a time to write albums and usually throws away most of what she writes in the beginning because it sounds old to her.
And as shown in a recent Diet Coke commercial dramatization of her writing process, Swift also holds her pencils really weird — leave it to the Internet to take great offense to this.
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