“When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!) — then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly — why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing.” – Joyce Carol Oates
At first glance, this reads almost like a joke. A clever little logical trap that loops back on itself but then you realise she’s completely serious. Then you realise she’s right. And then, if you’re a songwriter, you realise she’s been talking about you all along.
Oates wrote this about fiction writing, but swap out the novelist’s desk for a DAW, a guitar, or a notepad full of half-finished lyrics, and the logic holds perfectly. Whether the session is going badly or beautifully, the answer is always the same: keep going.
Let’s look at what she’s really saying, and then get into why it matters so much for songwriters specifically.
The Logic of the Trap
Oates sets up two scenarios that look like opposites. Writing is going terribly. Writing is going brilliantly. Most people would assume those two situations call for different responses. Push through one, enjoy the other, maybe ease off when it’s rough.
But she shows they lead to the exact same conclusion: you should be writing.
When it’s hard, stopping is cowardice. When it’s flowing, stopping is just plain stupid. There’s no third option that earns you a break.
Notice that she doesn’t dismiss the despair. She calls it real, even while calling it a little silly. That’s important. She’s not saying creative difficulty is all in your head or that you need to harden up. She’s saying the despair doesn’t change the equation.
You feel terrible and you keep going anyway.
The deeper point underneath all of this is that songwriting is in reality, a practice, not just a mood. You don’t get to outsource the decision to keep going to how you feel about it today. The work doesn’t care how you feel. It’s just sitting there waiting.
When the Writing Is Going Badly
Every songwriter knows this version of the day. You’ve been sitting with the same unfinished bridge for say… three days. The melody feels borrowed from something you can’t quite name. The lyric is either too on the nose or trying so hard to be clever that it means nothing at all. You open the session, stare at it for ten minutes, and close it again.
Oates would say: so what?
The difficulty doesn’t mean the song is bad. More often, it means you’re in the middle of solving a problem you haven’t fully understood yet.
Walking away at that point isn’t rest. It’s retreat. And when you come back, the song will still be there, except now it’s also carrying the extra weight of the fact that you already bailed on it once.
There’s also something specific to songwriting that prose writers don’t always face in the same way: the emotional weight of the material itself.
If you’re writing about grief, loss, or a relationship that ended badly, the difficulty isn’t always about craft. Sometimes the session is hard because the subject is hard. Oates’ argument applies here more than anywhere.
Those are often the most important songs. The ones that need to be finished.
A useful reframe when you’re in one of these sessions: instead of telling yourself “this is too hard,” try asking “what specific problem am I trying to solve right now?” Name the thing.
Is it the melody in the pre-chorus? A second verse that isn’t earning its place? An outro that doesn’t know where it’s going? Once you name it, you’re working on a problem. That’s a completely different thing from just suffering through a bad day.
When the Writing Is Going Smoothly (The Dangerous Part)
This is actually the more interesting case for songwriters, and the one that gets far less attention.
The music industry has a long romance with the story of the song that “wrote itself in twenty minutes.” Writers love to tell that story in interviews, and there’s real truth in it as flow states are a genuine thing.
Those moments when everything clicks and the song seems to arrive almost fully formed are some of the best experiences a songwriter can have, and you should absolutely ride them.
But what most of those stories leave out is what happened after the twenty minutes. And this is where Oates is pointing at something most songwriters eventually learn the hard way: stopping because it felt good is its own kind of mistake.
You write a verse and a chorus in one sitting. It’s all working, the ideas are coming fast, it feels like electricity. So you save the file and call it a day.
A week later you come back to finish it and the thread is gone and the specific creative headspace that produced those first two sections has moved on, and the bridge you write now sounds like it belongs to a completely different song.
The smarter move (which is basically what Oates is arguing for) is to stay in the room. Keep going while the channel is open.
Write the whole thing if you can. Even if the second half of that session needs work later, you’ve preserved the integrity of the creative moment. A rough but complete song is far easier to finish properly than a polished half.
The Real Question: Habit or Inspiration?
This is where the Oates quote lands hardest for songwriters.
Most songwriters, at some point, operate on the belief that you write when inspiration strikes and you wait when it doesn’t. It sounds reasonable. Even a bit romantic.
The problem is that this model hands complete control of your creative output to a force you have nothing to do with. You become a passenger in your own practice.
What Oates is describing is the alternative. Whether the muse shows up or not, whether it’s easy or agonising, the answer is the same: sit down and do the work.
Over time, that consistency builds something real. It creates muscle memory, keeps the creative machinery warm, and produces a volume and variety of work that waiting for inspiration never will.
The writers with the deepest catalogs almost universally talk about writing every day regardless of how they feel. Not because every session produces something great as plenty of days produce nothing you’d ever release. But because showing up consistently is what keeps the whole system running.
And here’s the thing about the bad-day songs: they’re not wasted. Sometimes a song you write on a terrible session is the raw material that a later, better session turns into something real. Sometimes writing a bad song teaches you exactly what you were trying to avoid.
Either way, you needed to write it.
On the Fear of Being Mediocre
Oates uses the word “cowardly” for stopping when the work is hard. That’s a deliberate word choice, and she means it seriously.
There’s a version of creative avoidance that dresses itself up as something more respectable. Protecting the purity of the work. Waiting until you’re in the right headspace. Not wanting to force it. These are real concerns, and they’re worth considering in moderation. But they can also become a very convincing excuse to stop.
Songwriters are especially susceptible to this because songs feel personal in a way that most writing doesn’t. A song carries your voice, your taste, your emotional fingerprint. Writing a mediocre one can feel like evidence that you’re not really who you think you are as an artist.
But always remember, mediocre songs don’t define you but stopping does.
Every songwriter with a body of work you respect has a drawer full of songs they’d never play for anyone. The difference between them and a songwriter who quit is that they kept going anyway.
Some Practical Ways to Apply This
This doesn’t need to be complicated. A few things that actually work:
Set a minimum viable session. Even twenty minutes of showing up counts. The goal isn’t brilliance every day, it’s consistency over time. Brilliance is a byproduct of the habit, not the thing you chase directly.
When it’s hard, name the problem. “I can’t finish this” isn’t a useful diagnosis. “The second verse isn’t connecting emotionally to the chorus” is something you can actually work on. Get specific and stay in the room.
When it’s flowing, finish the shape. Set a personal rule: don’t close the session until the idea has a beginning, middle, and end, even in rough form. Capture the whole thing while the creative moment is still alive.
Keep a fragment file. A simple document or folder of voice memos where half-ideas live. Nothing gets lost, but you’re also not sitting paralysed in front of an unfinished song waiting to feel ready. Offload it and keep moving.
Write something throwaway. A parody, a genre experiment, a song about something completely ridiculous. Just to keep the machinery warm on the days when nothing serious is coming through.
One Rule, Always the Same Answer
Go back and read the Oates quote now, with all of this in mind. It reads a bit differently, doesn’t it?
She’s not offering a motivational message. She’s not telling you to believe in yourself or trust the process. She’s doing something more useful: she’s closing the loopholes. Every reason you might give yourself to stop has already been accounted for, and the conclusion is always the same.
The question of whether to write has already been answered. It was answered before you sat down today, before you opened the session, before you knew whether it would go well or terribly. The answer was YES.
So you might as well get on with it.
