Hey Reader, Keppie here from How To Write Songs 👋

I’ve spent the past 17 years teaching songwriters how to write songs they’re proud of—and how to develop real confidence in their craft. Of all the things that keep songwriters stuck, lyric writing is very often at the top of the list. It’s the part that feels most personal, most exposed, and most likely to make you wonder whether what you’ve written is clichéd, unoriginal, awkward, or simply not worth anyone’s time. So today, I want to give you the three biggest things I know that can help you stop labouring over every line—and start writing lyrics with much more confidence.

1. Write abundantly

You need a small set of reliable exercises that help you generate a lot of language.

Not perfect language or polished lyrics; just lots of material.

When you write abundantly, you give yourself something to choose from. You can mine the writing for strong images, surprising phrases, interesting titles, emotional details, and lines you never would have found by staring at a blank page and asking yourself to “write something good.”

This is one of the biggest shifts in lyric writing: it stops being only about lyric writing.

It becomes lyric choosing.

You are no longer trying to invent the perfect line from nothing. You are selecting the strongest material from an abundance of possibilities.

2. Separate writing from editing

A lot of lyric-writing misery comes from trying to generate and judge at the same time.

You write half a line, assess it, reject it, replace one word, question the replacement, then return to the original. Twenty minutes later, you have written seven words and taught your brain that writing is dangerous.

Writing and editing are different jobs.

When you are generating material, your job is to follow the idea, make associations, take risks, and keep moving. When you are editing, your job is to assess what you have, identify what the song needs, and make deliberate choices.

Trying to do both simultaneously is like driving with one foot on the accelerator and one on the brake.

Give yourself permission to write an imperfect first draft without stopping to perfect every line. Then step away. When you return, you’ll be able to judge the lyric as part of a complete song—not as a collection of isolated sentences that each need to prove their brilliance.

Confidence doesn’t come from feeling like every word you write is gold. It comes from trusting that you can (and will) come back and make it better.

3. Build in accountability

Creative work is often the first thing to fall to the bottom of a to-do list.

In the face of an urgent email, a broken dishwasher, or the next episode of Alone Australia (in my case…), songwriting quickly gets pushed into a mythical future week when life will somehow become less busy.

This is why accountability is one of the strongest antidotes to creative procrastination.

Find a writing buddy. Work with a mentor. Join a course. Give yourself a deadline that matters to somebody other than you.

There is an entire field of psychology behind this, but the basic idea is simple: Willpower is not a reliable system.

We are much more likely to follow through when we design external structures that support the behaviour we want.

Write for life,
Keppie