Your abilities as a songwriter depend on training, not talent.
This craft is a long process of learning, making mistakes, and striving to get better. As a songwriter, you can slowly work your way from clueless beginner to complete master—or anywhere in between. There’s a general pattern that arises whenever you learn a new skill, and the pattern goes like this:
First you crawl, then you walk, then you run.
1. Crawl
During the crawl phase, your job is to just start learning about one new technique or concept until you accurately understand it. You can do this by reading about the technique, or you can have a teacher explain it to you. Ask yourself:
- What is this technique?
- How does the technique look, sound, and feel when correctly done?
- When is the technique or concept useful? Under what situations and circumstances might I use it?
When you tackle a new technique, open up your practice journal and answer those questions in writing. If you find yourself having trouble answering any of those questions clearly, keep studying until you understand the technique fully.
During the crawl stage, you might also follow the steps of the technique very, very slowly and carefully from instructions. Ideally you’ll have a teacher to give immediate feedback and correct your errors at this stage—but if that’s not an option, good teaching materials should offer some guidance on recognizing and avoiding common mistakes. Watch yourself carefully.
It’s crucial that you go very slowly and stop to notice these errors. When you notice them, immediately halt and attempt to correct them.
Take your time and really commit yourself to the crawl phase. If you have to stare at a teacher demonstrating a technique for twenty straight minutes, then by all means stare. If you’re confused and unclear on how the technique is performed, or what situations it’s useful in, research it some more or ask someone. It’s not always this simple, but sometimes even a quick web search can tell you what you need to know.
2. Walk
During the walk stage, you’ll try to perform the technique without referring to the teaching materials and without immediate prompting from your teacher. You take a few (often stumbling) steps on your own.
For lyric writing skills and music theory concepts, this stage might involve doing practice exercises from a workbook.
During the walk stage, go for accuracy, not speed. This requires you to pay really close attention to what you’re doing. Slow the tempo way, way down if that’s what it takes to perform the steps smoothly. Breathe. Stay focused on exactly how the technique should be correctly carried out. Slow down even more.
Once you can run through the steps of the process or technique smoothly and accurately at slow tempo, then and only then should you gradually begin to speed up. By the end of the walk phase, you’ll have practiced the technique or process until you can execute it without making mistakes and without having to expend much mental energy to get it done.
Psychologists call this automaticity. When you were a child, tying your shoes was a serious challenge. Thanks to practice and repetition, you can now tie your shoes correctly without having to even think about it. Is it because you are a naturally talented shoe-lacer? Were you destined to be fantastic at tying shoes? No! You practiced. And now you can do it without even paying attention to what your fingers are doing.
Arts like music composition and lyric writing are just like learning to tie your shoes. Each one involves learning a lot of fundamental skills that can seem mundane. And it can take many repetitions until you finally get the skill to where you need it. When you can finally perform the technique quickly and accurately with minimal thought, you’re ready to move on.
This point really is crucial during the Walk stage: Accuracy should always come before speed. Being fast and sloppy isn’t progress at all. Think tortoise, not hare. Speed up only very, very gradually. Practice hard now so you can make it look easy later.
3. Run
Speaking of tortoises and hares, after the Walk stage we reach the Run stage. Let’s do a quick recap:
Throughout the Crawl stage, you gained an intellectual understanding of the technique you’re working on and followed step-by-step instruction. During the Walk stage, you slowly and carefully applied the technique on your own, slowly at first and then with increasing speed and fluency.
This brings us to the Run stage.
During this final phase of the process, you’ll take on real-life conditions and apply the technique at performance tempos. Now that you’re well-versed in the technique and it’s become ingrained, you can turn your attention toward using it expressively, combining it with other techniques simultaneously, and so on.
Your goal during the run stage is to carry out exercises that imitate real-life performance as closely as possible. The run stage might take place in your practice space, or it might even take place on a live stage.
By this point you’ve come a long way, but stay alert! At all stages you need to pay close attention to your technique to make sure it’s accurate, clean, and fluid.
Never hesitate to return to the crawl or walk stages as necessary. Fixing problems, refining your understanding of a topic, and reviewing as needed are all essential to your growth as a songwriter. Reviewing fundamentals might feel like going backward, but retracing your steps really is progress.
Real talent can’t be rushed.
Some skills are quick to learn, and you might even find you’re able to progress from crawl to walk to run in a single session. But for tougher skills, it’s not unusual for the Walk phase to take multiple sessions. Some skills might require days or even weeks of work.
It’s crucial that you not try to rush through the Crawl or Walk stage of learning any new skill. Take as much time as you need to gain true understanding and precise, reliable technique.