Solution Six: The second song I wrote. This was a hard song to write. I had written A minor in a rush of emotion and feeling. It was a full on story song, long, personal, and so I assumed that song writers continued on in the same vein. Mining those songs until the vein ran out: Except, I wasn’t getting any more of those long story songs.
I would sit down to write and short emotion songs would begin to form instead. I would reject them, lying in my bunk in prison, or working in the laundry at 3:00 am switching loads.
Instead I began writing stories, and those stories began turning into novels; composition notebook after composition notebook after filled with those songs.
Then one of my nieces came to visit me, and at one point she got up to go to the vending machines and several guys followed her with their eyes. It pissed me off, strong emotion, and I eyed several of them.
Later I thought about it. The times in my life where I had seen someone beautiful. That helped with the anger over it; it was human nature, after all, but it also made me realize that what I wrote out about it, the emotion, although not a fully formed story song, actually conveyed the emotion and the story very well. That made me understand that not every song was going to be a full out story song. My second song was born, and many more came after it.