“Please stop thinking.” It’s funny, I teach writing, and before I taught I never would have guessed that’s the thing I say most often. But people really write better without thinking, by which I mean without self-consciousness… It’s not that I decide what to write and carry it out. It’s more that I grope my way towards something not even knowing what it is until I’ve arrived. – Kathryn Harrison, novelist
Harrison was talking about writing novels. But she might as well have been talking about writing songs.
If you’re new to songwriting, you’ve probably already run into the feeling she’s describing: you sit down with a guitar or a keyboard or a voice memo app, something starts to happen, and then almost immediately, something else kicks in that starts questioning it.
Is this good? Have I heard this before? Is this even the right chord? And just like that, the thing you were making either shuts down or turns into something smaller and more careful than it could have been.
Harrison’s advice… stop thinking.
Now, that sounds almost reckless coming from a writing teacher but what she’s actually talking about isn’t intelligence. It’s self-consciousness and learning to separate the two is one of the most useful things a beginner songwriter can do.
The two voices in the room
When you sit down to write, you’re running two separate processes. One wants to make something. The other wants to judge it. The problem is, they can’t really share the room at the same time.
The making voice follows a thread. It doesn’t know where the thread goes yet, but it keeps moving.
The judging voice (which is way faster and louder) wants to evaluate each step before you’ve taken the next one. It compares what you’re doing to something it’s already heard. It decides the chord progression isn’t interesting enough. It tells you the melody sounds derivative.
And then the making voice, which needed space and momentum to do its job, just… stops.
This is the core problem Harrison is naming. It’s not that critical thinking has no place in songwriting. It absolutely does. But there’s a time for it, and the first ten minutes of a new song idea is not that time.
The extra trap that songwriters face
Harrison wrote novels. Songwriters have an extra problem she didn’t have to deal with: the song form itself.
The moment you decide you’re working on a verse, your brain immediately starts filling in a template. Four lines, rhyme scheme, set up the chorus.
Suddenly you’re not following an idea, you’re completing a structure and completing a structure is a very different activity, one that tends to produce safe, predictable results.
Some of the best moments in songs are the parts that didn’t follow the plan. The pre-chorus that appeared out of nowhere. The chord that technically shouldn’t work but does. The line that came before anything else existed.
If you’re too focused on building the right architecture, you can miss those moments entirely or, you dismiss them because they don’t fit where you thought you were going.
What the critical voice actually sounds like
Harrison lists three specific voices that interrupt her writing process. Each one has a direct equivalent in songwriting.
The critical voice, translated…
“Those aren’t the words you want.”
In songwriting, this is the voice that tells you your lyric sounds too plain, too conversational, not poetic enough. So you reach for something more “lyrical” and end up with a line that sounds written rather than felt.
Plain language in lyrics is often exactly right. The voice lies.
“You shouldn’t be working on this part now.”
The chorus came before the verses. The bridge arrived before you have a song. You feel vaguely guilty, like you’re doing it in the wrong order. There is no correct order. If the chorus is what’s alive right now, that’s what you work on.
“Why not use the present tense?”
All the small structural second-guessing: wrong key, wrong tempo, wrong chord, wrong title. These are legitimate questions for later. In the early stages of a song, they’re just noise that pulls you out of the flow.
Any of those sound familiar? If you’ve written anything at all, they probably do. The goal isn’t to silence those voices permanently, it’s actually to stop letting them into the room before you’ve made something worth critiquing.
Generate first. Evaluate second.
This is the practical shift that makes the biggest difference: treating making and editing as two separate activities, not one continuous process.
A making session is where you follow the thread without stopping to evaluate. An editing session is where you look critically at what you’ve made and decide what to keep, change, or cut.
Running both at once is where most beginners lose good material. An idea gets written, the critical voice jumps in too early, the thing gets abandoned or overworked, and you never find out what it could have become.
Harrison says the intellect should kick in on later drafts. The same is true for songs. The edit is real and necessary, just not yet.
Here are some practical habits for the making session…
- Record voice memos and don’t listen back immediately. Let the idea exist before you judge it.
- Set a timer (15 or 20 minutes) and write without stopping to replay what you’ve done. Keep moving.
- Write something you fully intend to throw away. Paradoxically, this tends to produce things you want to keep.
- If a chorus shows up before you have verses, chase the chorus. Follow what’s alive, not what’s logical.
- Change your environment. A different room, a walk, a voice note in the car context shifts can quiet the monitor.
The imagined listener problem
There’s one more thing that makes songwriting harder than writing prose, and it’s something beginners feel acutely: the imagined audience.
When you’re writing a song, you’re almost immediately half-imagining someone hearing it. You’re performing it in your head before you’ve written the second line.
That imagined listener becomes yet another critical voice, and a particularly convincing one, because it feels like you’re being realistic about how the song will be received.
What it’s actually doing is pulling you out of the making and into the presenting. And you can’t do both at once.
Write the song for yourself first. Every time. The audience, if there is one, comes later once the thing exists and you’ve had a chance to figure out what it actually is.
What it feels like when it’s working
Harrison’s core point is this: the best writing surprises the person doing the writing.
If you already know exactly what the song is going to be before you make it, you’ve probably made something smaller than you’re capable of.
That uncertain, groping feeling — the sense that you’re not quite sure where this is going — isn’t a sign something’s wrong. It’s not a sign you lack talent or haven’t done enough work. It’s the process doing what it’s supposed to do.
It means you’re following something real rather than building something safe. Don’t worry, the critical voice will get its turn soon enough.
Later drafts, Harrison says, are exactly where the intellect should be. But in the early stages of a song, the best thing you can do is keep it quiet, stay in the room, grab the bull by the horns and follow the thread to wherever it takes you.
