He sang her his song. “That’s a good song,” she said.
Humbly he shrugged.
“Oh, it’s not me— It’s just the Lord.”
“Well. . . no. . .” she replied, “it’s not that good.”
“God gave me that song.” This is a claim we often hear from inexperienced but spiritually minded songwriters. While we wonder, “Why would God give anyone that song?” (Maybe He didn’t want it?), the writer obviously almost equates his songwriting process with the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures. No doubt he’s humbly trying to give God all the credit for the song; but who then should we blame for its imperfections?
Seeds
Being a songwriter is a bit like being a florist. Imagine a beautiful arrangement of flowers in a vase. Did God create that bouquet as we see it? No, He created seeds. Between the seeds and that gorgeous arrangement, a lot of human effort entered in. The more skilled the florist, the more beautiful and inspiring the arrangement will be, and the easier it will be to create it.
Songwriting is like any other endeavor. The diligent preacher doesn’t just open his mouth in the pulpit and then credit or blame God for whatever comes out. A successful Christian author doesn’t receive her ideas through automatic writing. A Christian surgeon doesn’t obtain his skills merely by praying to be a surgeon. No worthwhile skill in life comes to us fully developed without work and practice, and songwriting is no exception.
Voila!
We aren’t saying a song won’t occasionally come to you all at once. And what a blessing when it does! Don’t wait! Grab a pencil and scribble as fast as you can. But we find this sort of thing is the exception rather than the rule.
Skipping the Formalities
Most songwriters have never formally studied the craft, but all successful writers have studied it diligently by constantly analyzing successful songs written by others. They’ll also learn from their own failures and successes, to know how to avoid or repeat them.
A Musical Osmosis
When you find a good songwriter who says he writes purely by instinct, you’ll probably find he’s had years of constant exposure to music and he’s absorbed the craft by a kind of osmosis. He may not use a technical vocabulary, but the principles of good writing are obvious; you can tell what he’s listened to by what he writes. And yet, if you were to ask him how he goes about writing a song, he may not know how to tell you.
Not every successful song will have all the qualities of good songwriting, but a song that doesn’t have a good number of them won’t make it into the public arena.
So, what we’re doing in this series is examining these characteristics found in successful songs of all kinds and seeing how we can incorporate them into our songs. We hope it helps.