I had an email from a friend the other day. He’s a very good musician, but he has only written a few songs without a collaborator on the lyrics.

He told me he’d been trying to write songs for years but was paralyzed at every turn by the lyrics. That he’d been tearing up pages and pages of refill and not being able to get past the initial lines. He asked me if he was being too picky; if he should be writing bad songs so that he could at least finish them.

The simple answer to this question is yes. What usually blocks us is that our critical abilities outstrip our skill, which can only be developed with practice. So you’ve got to do some work that the critical side of you is going to hate, to get to something it might like. Ira Glass has great things to say about this here.

But I don’t think it’s as simple, or quite as a depressing as needing to write a bunch of bad songs in a row. You don’t necessary need to finish a song from that unpromising first lyric - but you do need to persevere with it a little longer. You’ve got to put a little faith into it.

Try to turn it into a first verse, no matter how bad it looks. Then try to write a second verse, even half a second verse. Get out an instrument and start doodling, humming tunes to the lyric.

If you do this, you may find the doomed lyric starts to change shape. You’ll find a line, a hook, or rhyme that surprises you, something you like or is at least thought provoking. Perhaps it will spark the idea you wanted all along and you’ll rewrite the whole thing into a workable song. It’s not likely though. More likely you’ll find a line that you makes you laugh, or an idea for a chorus to a different song. But this in itself is a victory. Because you just tricked yourself into getting past the first line of a song, and proved to yourself that you have some creative ability.

For the last few years, I’ve kept a folder on my desktop called ‘lyrics on the go.’ When I think of a line, a vague story or a title for a song, I throw it into a text edit file, and save it to that folder to come back to. Then once a day, forcing myself to ignore the sudden urge to make another cup of tea or run out of the house and buy a pie, I open one of those files, and I make myself add more, anything more, to one of them. The pain only lasts for the first couple of lines. Once I’ve done that much, ideas start flowing, and I start enjoying myself.

The main change between when I started doing this and now is that I make myself persevere longer and longer on those ideas. A year ago my folder was full of abandoned lyrics of about two or three lines long, and if they hadn’t gotten any further in the first week, they died. Now there are more songs with two verses and a chorus. And I will keep coming back to a song for six months if it takes that to finish it. Even if I don’t finish it - I travel down tangents and I learn more about my craft by pushing those ideas further.

Doing this everyday is also recent. In the past I was so frustrated because I wasn’t writing, but I would only write in times when I felt I had all the conditions right - a whole day with no other work to do, or an evening where I was feeling particularly unstable and therefore (in that awful logic we buy into) more creative. Writing everyday, even just for fifteen minutes, makes me feel like I’m doing my job, and creativity stops feeling like waiting to be struck by lightning.

When we were kids we all had Lego blocks. Can you ever think of a time that you got out your Lego and didn’t make something? No, you made a space ship or some abstract 3D stick figure or something, but you always made something. The only time you didn’t make anything is when you didn’t get out the Lego. Songwriting is the same. You have the building blocks for writing songs, and if you just let yourself play around with them for a few minutes you’ll create something. It might be crap, but it will be something.

Because we value art so highly, many of us terrified that we can’t really make it, even if we have before. Tonight it took me 20 minutes to pull myself away from some awful late period Adam Sandler movie on TV, not because I liked the movie, but because I was afraid to write. But tonight, just like every night I do this, I was pleased and surprised to see I came up with something okay. It just takes a little faith to start.

You can’t depend on your family
you can’t depend on your friends
You can’t depend on a beginning
you can’t depend on an end

You can’t depend on intelligence
You can’t depend on God
You can only depend on one thing
you need a busload of faith to get by

- Lou Reed, ‘Busload of Faith’