Can't Finish Your Song? Try These 5 Suggestions

There’s lots you can do to help you finish your latest song, including: put it away and wait a bit.

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Is there anything more frustrating than finding yourself stuck to finish a song that started out so easily? You’re walking to school or work, and a couple of great ideas pop into your head. As soon as you can, you grab your guitar and start writing down chords, lyrics, and singing bits of melody. It’s all going great.

And then you hit that uncomfortable “I-don’t-know-what-do-do-next” feeling. Maybe you’ve written a great chorus, or perhaps it’s a bit of verse. And it doesn’t seem to matter that it sounds great… you just feel stuck.

Let’s assume you’ve written a song chorus, but don’t know what to do next. Take a look at the following suggestions. One of them may open the floodgates and get you finishing that song:

1. Try inverting some of your chorus melody ideas. To invert a melody simply means to turn it upside down. So take a look at your melody and get a sense of the general direction of the melody. If the main part of your chorus is comprised of a melodic shape that moves upward, try using the same chords, but creating a melody that moves downward. Try it… start on the same note, but reverse direction. That gets you started; now try creating a verse melody from that idea. Just that one fragment may be enough to get your imagination working again.
2. Try moving your chorus hook downward. This is how it works: Let’s say your song is in the key of C major, with a C chord serving as the first chord in your chorus hook. If that hook starts on a G (sung over a C chord), try inventing a new melody that assumes the same shape as your chorus hook but starts lower, say, on an E. You may find that that lower melodic fragment will work well as a starter for your verse melody.
3. For verse lyrics, think of your chorus lyrics as an answer. If you’ve created a good chorus lyric, it may be difficult to know how to create a verse that leads to it naturally. To solve this, think of the chorus lyric as the result of whatever happened in the verse. If your chorus, for example, was “I only wanted to hold your hand…”, write down several statements which might allow that line to make sense. So write down things like, “It’s not like I wanted a lot…”, “I never wanted to change your life…”, “You don’t have to feel pressured…”, and so on. These may not be your verse lyric, but they get you thinking in the right direction.
4. Turn to other songs you’ve started. You might find that something you’ve written in the past will meld nicely with the song you’re working on right now. That’s why it’s always important to keep song fragments you’ve written, even if you think they’re duds. A dud in one song may be gold in another.
5. Put it away. Sometimes you can tell that a complete song isn’t going to happen today, so don’t stress over it. Put it away, and take it out again next week. Forcing songwriting rarely works.

Songwriters often feel that the best songs should just come out of you easily and effortlessly. But that’s rarely the case. Don’t be surprised if songs take a longer time to finish. You may find that the ones that take weeks or months to complete are the ones you end up feeling most proud of.

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