Writer's block is rarely a lack of ideas. More often it's a lack of a starting point — the blank page is just too open, and the pressure to write something good freezes you before you've written anything at all. A prompt fixes that. It narrows the field, gives your imagination a small door to walk through, and gets you past the hardest part: the first line. I've written songs in Dublin basements, London rooms and a New Orleans studio, and on the days the well felt dry, a constraint almost always got me moving again.
Below are fifty prompts I use and recommend, grouped by the kind of doorway they open. Use them however you like — but first, here's how to actually get a song out of one.
How to use these prompts
- Pick one and start within a minute. Don't shop around for the "best" prompt. The act of choosing fast is half the cure.
- Set a short timer. Ten or fifteen minutes. The goal isn't a masterpiece; it's material. You can't edit a blank page.
- Write badly on purpose. Let the first draft be clumsy. Brilliance is something you find in the rewrite, not the first pass.
- Lead with whichever comes easiest — words, a chord loop, or a hummed melody. Some of these prompts are lyric-first; some are melody-first. Follow the one that flows.
- Keep a scrap file. Half-finished verses and odd lines aren't failures; they're a pantry you'll raid later.
The one rule that matters: a prompt is a permission slip to make something imperfect. Its job is to get you writing, not to write the song for you. The moment a better idea hijacks the prompt, abandon the prompt and chase the better idea.
Memory & place
The most honest songs often come from somewhere specific. Mine your own life.
- Write about the last time you saw someone, without saying it was the last time.
- Describe a room from your childhood in three details, then who you wish was still in it.
- Write a song set entirely on one car journey.
- Pick a place you can never go back to and write a postcard to it.
- Write about a smell that takes you straight back somewhere.
- Describe a town you grew up in to someone who's never been there.
- Write about a photograph you wish you'd taken.
- Recall a summer that ended badly — start with the weather.
Character & voice
You don't have to write as yourself. Step into someone else and the truth often comes out sideways.
- Write from the point of view of the person who left, not the one left behind.
- Give a voice to a stranger you saw once and never forgot.
- Write a letter you'll never send, then make it a chorus.
- Write as an older version of yourself, looking back on right now.
- Take a side character from a story you love and let them sing.
- Write a conversation between two people where only one of them is honest.
- Speak as someone who is wrong but completely sure they're right.
- Write a song that's an apology — but don't name what for.
Image & object
A single concrete image can carry an entire song. Start small and let it grow.
- Build a whole song around one object: a key, a coat, a kitchen table.
- Write about something you kept that you should have thrown away.
- Describe the ocean as if you'd never seen it before.
- Use a piece of weather as a metaphor for a feeling and never explain the link.
- Write about a light left on in a house no one lives in.
- Take a cliché ("heart of gold") and write the song that earns it back.
- Describe a city at 3am.
- Write about hands — whose, doing what.
Emotion & theme
Big feelings are best approached at an angle. Find the specific moment, not the abstract idea.
- Write about joy without using the word happy.
- Find the exact moment a relationship turned, and stay there for a whole verse.
- Write about hope in the middle of something difficult.
- Write the song you'd want played at a moment that matters to you.
- Take an emotion you're ashamed of and tell the truth about it.
- Write about gratitude to someone who'll never hear it.
- Write about waiting.
- Describe what loneliness feels like in your body, not your head.
- Write a song that starts angry and ends tender — or the reverse.
Form & constraint
Limits are liberating. When everything is possible, nothing gets written — so close some doors.
- Write a song using only three chords.
- Write a complete song with no chorus — just verses that build.
- Limit yourself to one hundred words for the whole lyric.
- Write a song where every line starts with the same word.
- Write a chorus that's a single repeated line.
- Write a verse in which every image is something you can see from where you're sitting.
- Write a song with a title taken from something someone said to you today.
- Tell a full story in three short verses with no repetition.
- Write a song that's a list — of fears, of small joys, of things you'd take with you.
Melody-first
Words aren't the only way in. Sometimes the tune arrives first and tells you what it's about.
- Hum a melody into your phone before you write a single word, then find the words it wants.
- Sing nonsense syllables over a chord loop until real words surface.
- Steal the rhythm of a favourite melody (not the notes) and build something new on it.
- Start with the highest note you'll sing in the song and write backwards from that moment.
- Write a melody that only moves by small steps, then one that leaps — notice how different they feel.
- Set a timer and improvise a sung melody over a single droning note.
- Take a spoken phrase you love and find the tune hiding in how it's said.
- Write the melody for the chorus first, then build verses that make it land harder.
A song doesn't begin when you have something to say. It begins when you start saying something — and discover, halfway through, what you meant.
Now finish it
Here's the part nobody likes to hear: starting songs is easy, and most songwriters have a graveyard of half-finished ones. The real skill — the one that separates people who write songs from people who have ideas for songs — is finishing. A finished, flawed song teaches you more than ten perfect fragments. So when a prompt sparks something, push it all the way to an ending, even a clumsy one. You can always make it better, but only once it exists.
If you find that the starting is fine but the shaping and finishing is where you stall, that's exactly what a teacher is for. In songwriting lessons I help people turn sparks into finished songs — lyrics, melody, structure, and the honest editing that makes a good idea land. I teach one-to-one, in person on the Kāpiti Coast and online for students in Wellington and across NZ.
If your block is more about confidence than ideas, you might like my piece on whether it's ever too late to learn — the reassurance applies just as much to writing as to singing. And when you're ready to take a song the rest of the way, get in touch — bring me your most promising half-finished verse and we'll find its ending together.