A song is a made thing, not a mood
Welcome to Starting Rough. That's not me being modest about the module name. That's the actual plan.
Let me tell you what a song is, the way I've come to understand it. A song is not a feeling. A song is a made object. The feeling is the reason you sit down to make one, same as being hungry is the reason you can tomatoes. But hungry doesn't put a jar on the shelf. Work does. Words on paper, chords under your fingers, a shape that holds together and doesn't fall apart when somebody else picks it up. If you skip the work you don't have a song. You have a mood. Moods are fine. They just don't last, and they can't be handed to anybody else.
That's the whole lesson, really. Everything else this module is just me showing you how to do the work part.
Why this matters before you write a single line
People walk in here wanting to write about how they feel. That's not wrong, but it's backwards as a starting point. If you sit down chasing a feeling, you'll write in circles, because feelings don't have edges. A song needs edges. It needs a first line and a last line and something specific in between.
So today we're not writing about feelings. We're writing about things. An object. A person. A place you can point to. The point of the mountain in traffic. A tractor. A washing-day chore. Something you could describe to a stranger without using the word "feel" once.
The steps, for today
1. Pick one true, specific thing. Not "loneliness." A specific porch, a specific dog that died, a specific Saturday. If you can't picture it, it's too big. Shrink it until you can.
2. Write four lines about it. Plain ones. Don't rhyme yet. Don't worry about a tune yet. Just tell me what happened, in order, like you're telling a neighbor over the fence.
3. Pick up a guitar, or don't. If you play a little, find three chords you already know and strum through while you say the four lines out loud. If you don't play, say them out loud anyway, slow, like you're trying to remember them for later. You're listening for where the words want to bend.
4. Stop at four lines. I mean it. Don't write a fifth. We'll build the rest another day. Today's job is just proving you can make four true lines that stand up on their own.
That's the whole assignment. It'll feel too small. Good.
A story, since we're here
I sang one of my songs at a family gathering once. This was a couple years back, after I'd finished a few and gotten brave enough to do it in front of people who weren't Nelda. Everybody clapped, everybody said nice things, the way people do at family gatherings whether they mean it or not. I've learned not to trust that kind of nice.
My brother doesn't say much, ever. Never has. He came up to me afterward, didn't say it was good, didn't say much of anything, just asked if I had the words written down somewhere so he could keep them.
That meant more to me than every polite comment in the room put together. He didn't tell me it was amazing. He just wanted to keep it. That's the test I use now. Not "did they clap." Did they want to keep it.
Keep that in mind while you write your four lines today. You're not trying to impress anybody. You're trying to make something somebody would ask to keep.
A word on rough drafts
Yours will be bad today. Mine still are, most days, on the first pass. I wrote eleven verses about my father's tractor once before Jill told me "that's a lot of tractor" and I cut it down to three. The eleven-verse version wasn't a failure exactly. It was just unfinished work. You don't skip that stage. Nobody does.
So don't polish tonight. Don't worry about the melody being pretty — I still struggle with that part myself, always have, and I lean on plain simple tunes because the fancy ones get away from me. That's a gap I've made peace with. You can too, for now.
Write it plain. Write it true. Stop at four lines.
Before next time
Bring your four lines, however rough, and if a stray line shows up in your head at a stoplight this week, write it down somewhere you won't lose it. I keep a notebook in my truck for exactly that. Half of what's in there is nonsense later, but the other half is why I have anything to work with at all.