Inspiration is an active process. It engages your mind. The real work of songwriting is not sitting around like a human lightning rod waiting for good ideas to strike you—instead, most of songwriting involves mental gymnastics. You encounter a good idea somewhere; your mental filter snatches it up, you realize there’s potential there, and then your job is to use all your skills with words and music to take that idea and start building a song around it.
The progress of a song and the progress of a songwriter are similar this way: it’s not as though all of a sudden, all at once, you become a master. And it’s also not as though you can expect a song to just spring up perfectly from a seedling into a complete work of art in one flash. Usually perfecting a song takes a long time, lots of small changes, and multiple drafts.
Creative writing is one of those arts that people too often treat as though it’s some kind of inborn talent. But the truth is, whenever anybody puts a line of lyric together, they’re using a mental process that’s just as real as any act of manual labor. When a writer creates a brilliant metaphor, it’s because she has a mental process that she used to generate that metaphor. That process of constructing a metaphor is just as real as a carpenter hammering a nail. Or an oil painter mixing her colors. The only difference is that it’s harder to observe all the little actions and techniques of writing because they happen inside the songwriter’s head where we can’t easily observe the process.
So when people experience the work of a skilled writer, it seems almost like magic to them. Because the process is invisible. But great writing is not magic—it’s just a songwriter’s mind following learned mental processes to arrive at something interesting, surprising, and beautiful.