Can Songwriting— Or Any Other Kind Of Writing— Be Taught?

YES AND NO. BUT MOSTLY YES.

There is a little bit of truth in the notion that writing-- songwriting, or some other type of writing-- can't be taught, but there's a more useful truth available when you continue to talk about-- and think about-- the subject, but in a very different way.

Here’s how you can think about it.

The medical profession is entirely based on the shared belief that a doctor or nurse can tell you what to do to improve your health. I've never heard anyone suggest that doctors "can't make people healthy," simply because many of their patients don't take their doctor's advice.

So, I don't think "writing can't be taught" is the correct way to talk about what writing teachers can and can't do. Better to say that a writer has to do the things that writers do to get their material finished, and writers also have to do the things that writers do to make their material better. And a decent teacher can explain those things.

Will that make a non-songwriter into a songwriter? Maybe not. But whatever your limitations are as a songwriter, I can teach you how to overcome them.

Can I teach you to overcome them enough that you'll be great? I don't promise that. Nor do I promise that I can teach you to write hits. Nobody alive can teach that.

But I can teach you how to get better at the things that are hard for you. How MUCH better is up to you, and to a certain extent up to fate. But I can teach you to get better, instead of leaving it all up to fate.

A doctor can prescribe meds, exercise, sleep, nutrition, and so forth, but the patient has to go change their life and change their thinking before they will become healthy. The doctor can't make the patient care enough to change their life around in order to make it longer and healthier.

I can't make someone care enough about writing to listen to what I have to say about it-- my prescription, as it were. And I can't make someone care enough about writing to do it all the time, or to do everything possible to write more and to make their writing better.

If a person doesn't care enough to do those things, I can't make them.

But if you do care enough to experiment with your process, in order to write more songs and to write better songs, I can help. And I’ll be very happy to get the chance to!

My teaching is designed to show you strategies that will improve your productivity and your quality control.

But I want to be clear about what I do and do not claim about my teaching. I do not claim that my strategies are a kind of one-size-fits-all, and that every single songwriter on earth can and should adopt all my suggestions, 100%, no exceptions.

It would be foolish to claim that, and I'm quite sure it would not be true.

I do claim, though, that if you are not satisfied with your songwriting output in terms of quality and productivity, you should adopt my strategies, because they are likely to help you. I also claim that most of my guidelines can be ignored. But-- I give suggestions for how to get the best results possible when you're ignoring one of my guidelines.

If it's going to rain, I advise you to bring an umbrella. But if you don't like umbrellas, a raincoat and hat might do it. And if you don't like umbrellas or raincoats, I advise you to park right in front of wherever you're going, and run.

The point is: it's going to rain. There are various ways you can avoid getting wet, and some work better than others. And you can also just simply get wet, and live with it. That's always an option.

But pretending that rain doesn't exist, or that there is no possible way to ever avoid getting rained on-- that's not an option, unless reality isn't a priority for you.

LET'S TALK ABOUT SOME WRITERS THAT GET EXCELLENT RESULTS, EVEN THOUGH THEY DON'T FOLLOW MY GUIDELINES.

I know of several fiction writers who do not edit the way I do. Sometimes this system works well— for example, when Etgar Keret writes fiction. His work is profound. It's an endlessly renewable resource, for me, the stuff that he writes using a totally different system from mine, where his approach is largely instinctive and intuitive, and involves far less editing.

But Etgar is brilliant. (He’s on substack, by the way. Check him out—

Etgar Keret

)

His success with that type of approach is by no means evidence that that approach is right for everyone. I think that the intuitive approach to art is, for most people, the one that will make their output slow and low quality.

I also question the idea that my system is rigid, all about rules, soulless, etc. I think it's much more accurate to say that the intuitive approach is the rigid one. My system always leaves room for intuition, spontaneity, emotions, and all the other things that aspiring artists typically prize above organized thinking. I don't just leave room for them, I consider them an indispensable component of my method.

But the 100% intuitive approach leaves no room for organization or analysis; its whole foundation is that you shouldn't analyze what you're doing, or try to make your process more organized and analytical.

The apologists for intuition have an essentially superstitious belief that organization and analysis will ruin your art. There is no evidence for that; it's just nonsense people say so they can feel good about being unwilling to do certain kinds of work.

I offer a caveat here— the fiction writer Etgar Keret uses an improvisational approach and edits only a little. But that doesn't mean, to me, that his method is any less organized or analytical than mine. He's not bloviating about a superstitious belief that editing can't ever be good for anyone’s work. Rather, he's very organized and analytical about his own personal method, one which has worked for him for decades. His dedication to his method is arguably part of an editing process. The other part is him rejecting 90% of his stories as unsuccessful. Part of his analysis is that he knows he will write a complete and successful piece only about 10% of the time.

And I suggest that a writer whose method fails 90% of the time, but who still can be described as prolific, and consistently strong, is in fact a highly organized and analytical artist. His organized approach might appear more chaotic than mine, but that’s an illusion, I think. And it works beautifully for him.

Also-- his approach yields a certain kind of story. That works well for him, but it works well for his very personal style of writing-- his style is absolutely bound up with his process. And that is by design. You can hear him talk about his method, and what he gets from it. And he says his method fails, 90% of the time. And he's fine with that, because he likes the kind of story that comes from this method. He doesn't want to have a story that comes from looking at a failed attempt, analyzing why it doesn't work, and adjusting it in some way. And I am by no means suggesting his method is bad because of this. His results speak for themselves; his stories are unique, and consistently good.

Most amateur writers, I would guess based on my anecdotal research, fail nearer to 100% of the time, either in terms of productivity or quality control or both. So a 90% fail rate begins to look pretty good. Especially when the successes are very successful indeed.

I can also think of a songwriter that I like very much, who works completely intuitively and is the most prolific songwriter in rock, to my knowledge. And I am a big fan.

But that writer is VERY hit-or-miss, and in a fascinating way; even his fans often argue that the quality control could be tightened a smidge and he'd still be great, and hen would continue to be more productive than virtually every songwriter.

I love the work of this unnamed songwriter, and I love Etgar’s work too. But they both have a high failure rate. Etgar wisely throws away the failures; the songwriter releases everything. The former has great quality control but his productivity is arguably inefficient. The songwriter has the most productive approach ever, but the quality control department arguably lets a lot of clunkers through.

My point is not that these writers are wrong. Rather, I'm arguing that using SOME organization and analysis can help with either productivity or quality control or both, and those two artists both have enough organization and analysis to help them with one but not the other. And they like the result, as well they should. There is a lot of passion out there for both of them. And anyone who likes either of them knows they are both masters.

Both of them have made quite a bit of room for intuition. I also do that. You have to; with all my analysis, and organizational thinking, I still approach melody intuitively, to give the largest example of a thing I do intuitively.

But! I do have ways to analyze why a melody doesn't work, if I write one and I'm not sure it works. And I can breathe life into a melody if it can't breathe on its own. I work on melody intuitively, but only until I don't love the melody I'm writing. As soon as I'm not crazy about the results, I shift to analytical problem-solving mode.

I can also look at a great melody by someone else, and tell you very specific things about why it works. Usually, I can tell you three very different reasons why it works, in under five minutes. This doesn't even feel like bragging to me; I learned how to do this, and I learned it over a long period of time, and much of my ability there is based on stuff where I sat in a classroom and a teacher patiently explained how to do it. And I took notes, and studied handouts, and textbooks, all of which explained how melody works.

I can teach people everything I know about melody.

And that's just melody. It's the same for the other areas of music, chords, rhythm, song structure, etc. I can teach you how to create all of that. And words, too, though I have to confess I learned most of what I know about lyrics outside the classroom.

Unless you want to call it the Bob Dylan classroom, and the Gershwin and Cole Porter classroom, and the Beatles classroom, and the Hank Williams classroom, and the Carole King classroom, and the Smokey Robinson classroom, and the Chuck Berry classroom, and the Dolly Parton classroom, and the Randy Newman classroom, and the Willie Dixon classroom, and so on. Let's also mention the Ellie Greenwich classroom, but there we must stop, for now.

Let's talk more about the intuitive approach.

Any songwriting area where you can compose spontaneously, operating completely on intuition, that's something you should make use of. And operating completely on intuition doesn't necessarily lead to bad results.

But it does often lead to stalling out, where you have essentially painted yourself into a corner. The intuitive approach is very effective when it's leading you to ideas you like, but when that stops happening? Unless you also have a non-intuitive approach as a backup, you're done.

I use organizational and analytical thinking to get me out of those corners. I never get stuck in a corner; that's what compositional training is for, learning how to get out of any corner. Learning how to solve every puzzle.

More next time! Please ask questions in the comments, because that helps me to find out what people want to learn about songwriting. And please share and like this post, and recommend me to your subscribers, because it really helps me to reach more people.