How to Start Songwriting: Your First Month, Week by Week

Forty voice memos and not one song

Open the voice memo folder of anybody who has been "getting into songwriting" for a year. Thirty entries, forty, more. Most of them run between eleven seconds and a minute. A riff recorded in a kitchen. Eight words hummed over two chords. The first half of a verse, cut off by somebody walking in.

That folder is the beginner problem, and notice what it is not. Nobody in there had trouble starting. They started forty times. What none of those forty did was arrive anywhere, and the advice aimed at beginners almost always points at the wrong end of the pipe: find your voice, write what you know, keep a notebook, capture ideas. All of it helps you accumulate more of what is already piling up unused.

So here is the rule this whole first month runs on, and it is the only one worth arguing about.

Finish everything. Quickly. Badly.

Not "finish what deserves finishing". Everything. A four-line song counts as finished if it has a beginning and an end and you stopped on purpose. Ten finished bad songs will teach you more in four weeks than one carefully nursed good one will teach you in a year, and the reason is not motivational.

What finishing teaches that drafting never will

Drafting teaches you one skill: producing a good line. That is the skill everyone already has some of, which is why everyone stalls at the same place. Finishing teaches six more, and you cannot get at any of them from inside a fragment.

How to end. A song has to stop, and stopping is a craft decision with maybe five real options: repeat the hook until it dissolves, land on the title line and cut, drop to one instrument, answer the first line of the song with a changed version of it, or go out on the thing you refused to say earlier. You will not discover any of that in a verse-and-a-half. You discover it the first time you sit in front of a nearly finished song and realise you have no idea how to get out of the room.

Proportion. Eight lines of verse against a two-line chorus feels bottom-heavy in a way you can only hear once both parts exist. On paper it looks fine.

That the chorus is different the second time. Same words, different meaning, because a verse happened in between. Beginners write the chorus once and paste it. Finishers notice that the second pass wants a small change: one word, an extra line, the same line delivered like a defeat instead of a promise.

Transitions. The two bars between the verse and the chorus are where most amateur songs visibly seam. You cannot practise a seam if you only ever build one panel.

Titles. Naming a thing forces you to decide what it is about. Half the time you find out your song is about something other than what you sat down to write, and that discovery only arrives at the end.

Judgement over a finished thing. This is the big one. A good line tells you nothing about whether the song is worth playing to somebody, and nothing about whether this one beats the last one you finished. That verdict only exists between complete songs, and until you own two of them there is nothing to hold one against.

Every one of those six lives past the point where the fragment stops. That is the entire argument for finishing badly: a bad finished song contains all six lessons at low quality, and a brilliant unfinished one contains none of them at any quality.

Week one: three songs, four lines each, all three finished

Tonight, not Saturday. Here is the exact sequence.

Pick three situations, not three themes. A theme is "regret". A situation is "the last time I drove past their street and did not slow down". Write the three situations on one line each, and give each one a place and a time of day. If you cannot say where you are standing and what hour it is, what you have is still a theme. Our longer walkthrough of how a lyric gets built goes into why situations outperform themes; here you only need the rule.

Then, for each situation, four lines. Six to ten syllables each. Rhyme line two with line four and leave lines one and three alone. Say every line out loud at singing speed before you keep it, because a line that reads well and breathes badly is the most common thing a beginner writes.

Here is one of mine at exactly that spec:

I left the porch light on for no one
The moth came anyway at ten
The kettle clicked and I ignored it
And then I did the same again

Nine syllables, eight, nine, eight. Only one rhyme in the whole thing, "ten" against "again". Both unrhymed lines are physical, a porch light left on and a kettle nobody answers, and no line anywhere names a feeling. Nothing in it is clever. It took about four minutes and it is done, which is the only property that matters this week.

Three of those tonight. Do not go back and improve them. Do not keep the best one and abandon the other two. Three finished four-line songs, and then close the notebook. If you are stuck for situations, a bank of writing constraints and starting positions will unstick you faster than staring at a wall.

Week two: give each song a second section

Now each of your three songs gets a chorus. Not a good chorus. A second section.

The mechanical instruction: five to seven syllables in the first line, then repeat that line, then two lines that close on a rhyme. The repeat is not laziness. Repetition is how a chorus signals that it is a chorus, and beginners underuse it by an enormous margin because repeating yourself feels like cheating when you are writing and feels like relief when you are listening.

Leave the porch light on
Leave the porch light on
Whoever isn't coming, let them see
There's still a way back in to me

Five syllables, then the same five. Then ten and eight, rhyming see with me. The chorus says the thing the verse was too proud to say, which is the job of a chorus roughly nine times out of ten. If you want the mechanics of why hooks behave this way, the chorus-specific breakdown covers the syllable and repetition patterns in more detail.

Do all three. Two of them will be weak. Finish them anyway, and now notice what you just learned that you could not have learned in week one: you can feel the proportion. The four-line verse against the four-line chorus sits differently in each of the three songs, and the difference is audible even in your own head.

Week three: rewrite the worst one, not the best one

Everybody wants to rewrite the best one. The best one has the least to teach you, because the parts that work in it are already working and you do not know why.

Take the worst of the three. Rewrite by these three moves, in order:

1. Keep exactly one line. Whichever survives being said out loud last. Copy that line to a blank page and leave the other seven where they are. The old version stays intact and unedited, because you compare against it at the end of the week.
2. Change the time of day. Same situation, different hour. A scene at 7am and the same scene at 2am produce different verbs, different noises, different reasons for the character to be awake. This is the cheapest rewrite lever in songwriting and almost nobody uses it.
3. Write the new version in one sitting without reading the old one. Cover it or close the tab. Rewriting with the original in view produces edits, and you want a version, not edits.

Compare the two afterwards, both versions in front of you, and say which one you would play to somebody. Sometimes the original wins. The week ends with two complete versions of one song and a verdict on which survives, and that verdict is the first time you have measured a whole song against another whole song instead of against what you meant to write.

Week four: make something a person can actually hear

Four weeks in, your songs exist only in your head and in handwriting. That is a private hobby, not songwriting, and the gap between them closes with one phone recording.

The instruction: one song, one take, phone voice memo, no second attempt. Sing it badly. If you do not play anything, sing it with no accompaniment at all. If you have three chords, use three chords. Then listen back once the following day, and write down the single moment you flinched.

That flinch is data you cannot get any other way. Text hides bad phrasing; a recording does not. The line that was fine on paper and unsingable at tempo shows up in the first ten seconds. Getting a listenable recording without any instruments or studio covers the options if the phone memo makes you want to do slightly better.

Hand it to one person. Not five. One, and ideally somebody who does not write songs, because other writers critique the craft and you need to know whether a stranger stayed interested.

Three things to skip for now

Gear. An interface, a microphone and a monitor pair will not add one finished song to your count. The gear conversation is seductive because it converts a hard problem into a shopping problem. Your phone records at a quality that is completely adequate for the only job recording has in month one, which is exposing bad phrasing to you personally. Buy nothing until you have twelve finished songs and a specific complaint about your recordings.

Music theory. Theory is excellent at explaining what already happened and useless at making it happen. Knowing that your chorus lifts because it starts on the relative minor changes nothing about your ability to write the next one. Theory becomes genuinely valuable at the point where you are working with other musicians or arranging, which is not now. The producer-facing theory primer is worth a read later, in month three or four, when you have songs to apply it to.

An opinion about your own style. This is the expensive one. Deciding at week two that you are a moody indie-folk writer will quietly veto every idea that arrives in a different costume, and at four songs of experience you do not have the sample size to know anything about yourself. Style is a residue. It shows up in what your first thirty songs have in common, and you find it by reading back, not by declaring it up front.

The one genuinely hard beginner problem

Here it is: the song is wrong, you can feel it, and you cannot name what is wrong. This is the real wall, and every hour you spend circling it is an hour of nothing. The fix is a four-step diagnostic, in this order, no skipping.

1. Read it aloud as speech. No melody, no rhythm, just talk it. Anything that makes you stumble as plain speech is a construction problem, not an art problem: a subject too far from its verb, three stressed syllables in a row, a word you would never say.

2. Sing it to your phone. Any melody, however bad. Length problems that hide in text become obvious the moment there is a bar line. You will hear yourself compressing one line and stretching another to fit.

3. Leave it a day. Not an hour. A day. Fresh ears are not a myth, they are the cheapest editing tool in existence, and they are the reason the whole finish-fast approach works: finished songs can be left alone, fragments cannot.

4. Name the exact line where you stop caring. This is the step that actually solves it. Play your recording back and mark the precise moment your attention drifts. Not the section. The line. Then look at that line and check it against four causes, which between them explain most dead lines:

• It contains no object and no action at all, only a feeling named outright.
• It is filler holding the rhyme in place, and you know which one it is.
• It repeats information the previous line already gave.
• It does have an object or an action, but an interchangeable one that would sit unchanged in anybody's song: a door, a car, headlights, rain.

Watch it work on the verse from week one, with one line swapped:

I left the porch light on for no one
The moth came anyway at ten
I thought about how love is fleeting
And then I did the same again

Line three is the only line in the verse that holds no object and no action at all, and it is the exact place attention dies. The diagnostic does not require taste, only counting. The other three lines report actions; that one delivers a sentiment. The first cause and the fourth can never land on the same line, because a line either has a physical thing in it or it has not, so the check sorts lines rather than piling labels on one. Replace line three with anything physical and the verse comes back to life.

Where a generator helps and where it takes the lesson away

Straight answer, in two halves.

Week one: keep it closed. An AI song generator writes a title and a full structured lyric from one theme field, which is precisely the task you are trying to learn to do. Using it now is like learning to swim while holding the side. You will produce four competent songs in week one and you will have learned nothing about how to end a song, because the ending arrived pre-made. A beginner who leans on generation in the first fortnight tends to stay a beginner with a bigger catalogue.

Week four: open it deliberately, for shape. Once you have written and finished about a dozen of your own, the tool stops being a substitute and becomes a reference. Give it the same situation you already wrote about. Set structure to story or classic, pick one hook direction, choose up to three emotional tones, and read what comes back for its architecture and not its words. Where does it put the bridge. How much shorter is its chorus than yours. What does it repeat that you never thought to repeat. Then close it and rewrite your own version. You are comparing skeletons, not borrowing lines.

There are two other honest uses. First, the twentieth alternative line: when you know a line is wrong and you have already produced nineteen replacements that are also wrong, generating a batch breaks the loop even if you keep none of them. Second, hearing your own finished lyric performed. The generator pages produce the words; Suno performs them, and Suno is not ours. If you want your week-four lyric sung back to you properly, take your own finished lyric into Suno rather than generating a new one. Each generated song costs 20 credits, which works out at twenty cents, and the current plan details are on the pricing page.

The distinction that matters: a tool that does the thing you already know how to do saves you time. A tool that does the thing you are trying to learn costs you the lesson. Same tool, and the only variable is which week you are in.

FAQ

How long before I write a song I actually like? Most people who finish at the pace above get one they do not wince at somewhere between song eight and song twenty. The number is unhelpful on its own; the useful part is that it is counted in finished songs, not in weeks or hours. People who write for six months without finishing stay at zero.

Do I need to play an instrument? No, and the reason is not that instruments are optional in music. It is that lyric and melody can both be worked on with a voice and a phone, and adding an instrument in month one adds a second beginner-level skill to an already awkward one. If you do play, three chords are enough for everything above.

Lyrics first or melody first? Whichever one you have. The question is a trap because it implies you get to choose, and in practice something arrives and you work from it. What does matter: if you start from melody, write nonsense syllables to fix the rhythm before you write real words, or the words will fight the tune.

Every song I write sounds the same. Is that bad? At four songs, it is not information. At forty it is your style and you should look at it on purpose. The fastest way to break a rut in the meantime is mechanical: change the point of view to second person, change the time of day, or write from a narrator who is not you.

Is it cheating to use an AI lyric tool? There is no referee, so cheating is the wrong frame. The real question is what you are buying with it. If you are buying a finished song, you get a finished song and no skill. If you are buying a structure to study or a way to break a stuck line, you get both. Week one, closed. Week four, deliberately.

Should I show people my first songs? One person, after week four, and pick a listener rather than a writer. Also ask the right question. "Is it good?" gets you politeness. "Where did you stop paying attention?" gets you a line number, and a line number is a thing you can go and rewrite.

What do I do in month two? Same rule, bigger unit. Three songs a week becomes one song a week with three sections, and the finishing requirement does not move. The moment you allow yourself an unfinished song, the voice memo folder starts filling up again.