How to Get Rid of Songwriter's Block for Good
By Written by Peter McVeigh
The best cure for songwriter's block isn't another writing exercise. It's closing the notebook and going to live. Here's why and how to come back stronger.
Writer's block gets talked about like it's some mysterious creative illness that descends on you from nowhere and disappears when inspiration strikes again.
I don't think that's what it's. Not really.
In my experience, writer's block is closer to a form of depression. It's not that you can't write. It's that everything you write, you think is rubbish. You sit down, you get something going, and before it's even half-finished your internal critic has already written it off. You close the laptop. You put down the guitar. You tell yourself you'll try again tomorrow.
Tomorrow arrives and the same thing happens.
That's not a lack of ideas. That's a judgment problem. And the solution isn't always another creative exercise. Sometimes it's something much more basic.
The Internal Critic Isn't Your Friend Right Now
Every songwriter has two modes. The generative mode, where you're making things without judging them. And the editorial mode, where you're sorting through what you've made and deciding what's worth keeping.
Writer's block almost always means those two modes have collapsed into one. You're trying to write and edit at the same time, and the editor is winning every argument before the writer has had a chance to finish a sentence.
The technique advice helps here. There are exercises that can loosen things up, prompts that can get you moving again, constraints that can short-circuit the critic by giving you something specific and small to solve. I've put some tools in the Documents section of this platform that are worth working through if you're stuck.
But technique will only get you so far. If the well is genuinely dry, you need to go and fill it up again.
The Fran Healy Problem
There's a story I love about Fran Healy from Travis. His management told him he needed a holiday. He'd been grinding, the writing wasn't coming, and they figured some sun and rest would sort him out. Maybe he'd come back with something more upbeat.
He went on holiday. It rained the entire time.
He wrote Why Does It Always Rain On Me. Travis's first massive hit.
The management weren't wrong, exactly. He did need to go and live something. They just couldn't have predicted what he'd live through, and they definitely couldn't have predicted what he'd do with it.
That's the thing about experience as a source for songwriting. You can't control what it gives you. You can only put yourself in a position to receive it.
Watch What's Happening Around You
I sang in bars for a long time. And one of the things I learned in those years is that if you stop thinking about yourself for a while and just watch, there's more material in a busy room than you could write in a year.
There's the couple in the corner having an argument they're trying to keep quiet. There's the group celebrating something that clearly means more to one person in it than anyone else. There's the person sitting on their own who looks like they're waiting for something, or someone, that probably isn't coming.
There's love starting. There's love ending. There's hope about to change into something else entirely, and you can see the exact moment it shifts if you're paying attention.
None of those people know they're giving you something. But they're.
Step Outside Your Own Head
The trap that writer's block sets is that it turns you inward. You spend more and more time thinking about the fact that you're not writing, which crowds out the experiences and observations that would actually give you something to write about.
The best thing you can do when you're stuck is to stop trying so hard and go and be somewhere.
Not nowhere specific. Somewhere. A different town. A long walk somewhere you'ven't been. A gig you didn't organise and aren't performing at. A conversation with someone outside the music bubble who talks about completely different things.
You're not going there to find a song. You're going there to remind yourself that the world is full of things happening that haven'thing to do with your creative struggle. And somewhere in that, without you forcing it, a line will appear.
Write Through It Anyway
There's another approach that works for some people, and it's less romantic than going on holiday or sitting in a bar watching the world.
Just write. Not for quality. For completion.
Finish the bad song. Finish the one you've already decided isn't good enough. Get it to the end anyway, because the discipline of finishing things is separate from the quality of what you finish, and you need both muscles working.
A lot of writers who've been doing this for a long time will tell you that their worst songs occasionally contain their best lines. Or that the process of finishing something bad cleared the way for something better. The bad song was the thing that had to come out first.
Don't let the internal critic convince you that a song isn't worth finishing because it'sn't good yet. Finish it. File it. Move on to the next one.
A Few Things Worth Trying
If you need somewhere to start, here are some approaches that can help shift things.
Change the location. Don't write where you always write. Go somewhere unfamiliar and bring a notebook or your phone. Somewhere with people in it.
Write about something you've observed rather than something you've felt. Pick a person you saw recently and write from their perspective. You don't know their story, so you'll have to invent it.
Set a constraint. Write a song with no more than three chords. Write a verse in under four lines. Write something you'd never normally write. Constraints force the critic to stand down because the brief is too specific for it to argue with.
Collaborate with someone. Bring your half-finished ideas into a room with another writer. Something that felt dead on your own can come alive when someone else hears the seed of it.
And if all of that fails, go and live some life. Come back when you've got something to say.