Here’s an idea that seems to be equally as tenacious and harmful as the talent myth: the myth of inspiration.
Many people seem to have the idea that inspiration hits an artist the way lightning strikes a tree. They think of inspiration as something outside your control that just sort of happens to you. I think that’s a dangerous idea because it encourages songwriters to have a passive attitude. Sitting around just hoping for an idea to appear out of the clear blue sky is not an effective approach.
Inspiration is simply what happens when you collide with something that has potential to be developed into a song. These encounters are very exciting, but there’s nothing mystical about them. That’s just your knowledge of song craft connecting with some promising material. That’s it.
So it stands to reason that the more you study the craft, and the more you expose yourself to interesting literature, music, and life experiences—basically, the more actively you engage the world—the more likely you are to find so-called “inspiration”.
About revision
First drafts can always be improved in some way. Lyrics can be rephrased, melodies can be rewritten, words can be replaced with stronger ones, entire songs can be renovated and restructured. Weak points can be identified and strengthened; strong points can be recognized and developed further. The Categories of Change (add, subtract, rearrange, replace) can be applied to any aspect of your lyric or music.
Just as each songwriter is a work-in-progress that takes shape over time, each song is a work-in-progress too. Sudden flashes of insight don’t just happen at the beginning of songs; in fact, for many writers inspiration comes in the middle of the process, or even toward the end. But much of the middle part of the process often requires you to solve problems and apply techniques.
Some songwriters spend hours or even entire days just working on one or two lines of a lyric. Just like Erasmus of Rotterdam, they might rewrite the same line in dozens and dozens of different ways in search of that one phrase that really works.
Inspiration and discipline are not separate—they feed into one another.