Just imagine… You’re twenty minutes into a writing session. The verse is fine, maybe better than fine. And then the chorus won’t come.
You try a line, it’s flat. You try another, it’s worse. The clock keeps moving and there’s a small, familiar voice starting up in the back of your head: maybe this one isn’t going to work. Maybe you’re out of ideas. Maybe it’s just not there today.
If you’ve written more than a handful of songs, you’ll definitely know this moment. It doesn’t matter how many songs you’ve finished before. It shows up anyway.
The writer Clive James spent most of his life trying to figure out what actually changes as you get better at a craft. Late in his career, he said something that really stuck with me. He talked about growing “more resigned to the fact that it comes hard,” and that the real skill wasn’t making the hard part go away. It was learning not to panic when it showed up.
The full quote goes like this…
“The only thing I’ve got better at as the years have gone by is I’ve grown more resigned to the fact that it comes hard. You realize that hesitation and frustration and waiting are part of the process, and you don’t panic. I get a lot better at not panicking. I get up every morning early if it’s a writing day and I will do nothing else but write that day. But the secret is not to panic if it doesn’t come.”
For me, that was worth sitting with, because it cuts against almost everything we’re taught to believe about creative work.
We tend to assume that getting better means it gets easier. That the pros don’t get stuck, or if they do, it’s rare, and it resolves fast. So when we hit a wall on a bridge or can’t land a chorus, it feels like proof something’s wrong. Proof we’re not cut out for this, or we’ve lost whatever we had.
However, James is saying the opposite. Getting better doesn’t mean the wall stops showing up. It means you stop being surprised by it.
Being Stuck Isn’t The Problem. Panic Is.
Here’s the thing about panic in a writing session: it’s what makes you settle. The chorus won’t come, the discomfort builds, and instead of sitting in that gap, you grab the nearest workable line just to make the feeling stop. It rhymes, it scans, it’s fine. And “fine” is exactly the problem.
Most weak choruses aren’t weak because the writer lacked talent. They’re weak because the writer panicked and closed the gap too early.
If you can separate the two things, the feeling of being stuck and the panic, you get somewhere useful. Being stuck is just information. It means the song isn’t done cooking yet. Panic is the reaction that convinces you to serve it undercooked.
Once you stop treating a stalled session as an emergency, you can actually use it. You can leave the chorus blank and come back to it. You can write three bad options on purpose, just to clear them out of the way. You can go for a walk instead of forcing a rhyme that everyone, including you, will know is a placeholder the moment they hear it.
The Session And The Song Are Not The Same Thing
A lot of the pressure in songwriting comes from the quiet assumption that a good session equals a finished song. Once you believe that, every session where nothing gets finished feels like a failure, and failure is exactly the kind of thing that trains you to panic faster next time.
Try measuring it differently. A session where you sat with a hard line for forty minutes and didn’t force a bad answer is not a wasted session. It’s the same work a carpenter does sanding a joint that isn’t quite square yet. Nobody would call that time wasted. It just doesn’t look like progress if progress only means “words on the page.”
Waiting Is Not The Same As Doing Nothing
There’s a specific kind of patience songwriting asks for that other kinds of writing might not. A half-formed melody sitting in your head for three days isn’t dead time. It’s doing something, even if you can’t see it. Ideas need room to sit before the right version of them shows up, and rushing to fill the silence usually means you talk yourself out of the better line that was still on its way.
This is where the discipline part of James’s quote matters just as much as the acceptance part. He didn’t say “wait until you feel like writing.” He said he shows up on writing days no matter what, and does nothing else that day but write. The waiting and the ritual aren’t opposites.
The ritual is what makes the waiting survivable. You can afford to sit with an unfinished line if you know you’ll be back at the desk tomorrow regardless of how today went.
What You Can Actually Control
You can’t control whether a great line shows up in a given session. You can control whether you show up for the session at all, and whether you give the hard parts room to breathe instead of papering over them.
A few ways to put that into practice:
- Separate finishing from writing. Give yourself permission to end a session with an unfinished verse. Write “TBD” in the lyric sheet and move on. It’s not failure, it’s an honest placeholder.
- Notice the urge to settle. When a line feels “fine” but not right, and you’re reaching for it just to end the discomfort, that’s the moment to stop and name what’s happening. That’s panic talking, not judgment.
- Build the ritual around time, not output. Show up at the same time each week whether or not last week’s session produced anything. The habit is the part you’re actually building.
The Long Game
James was talking about a whole career’s worth of writing days, not one afternoon at the piano or strumming a guitar. That’s the real shape of this idea.
The songwriters who keep writing for decades aren’t the ones who never get stuck. They’re the ones who stopped being alarmed by it, built a routine that didn’t depend on inspiration showing up on schedule, and trusted that the stuck sessions were doing something even when they didn’t look like it.
If you’re in the middle of a song that’s fighting you right now, that might be the most useful thing to take from all this: the fight isn’t a sign you’re doing it wrong. It might just mean the song isn’t finished cooking. And if you’ve been stuck on the same line for weeks and want another set of ears on it, that’s exactly the kind of thing a second opinion is good for.
