Hmmm…it really depends on the songwriter. (How’s that for a cop-out?) I’ll tell you one mistake that I make all the time: getting paralyzed by believing that everything you come up with has to be amazing. It doesn’t. You have to put in the hours. Writing crap leads to writing better crap leads to writing stuff with glimmers of promise and maybe the occasional stroke of genius. And then you find yourself writing crap again the next day. That’s the way it works. At least for most of us, last I checked. Songwriting is a roadtrip; sometimes you drive through miles and miles of flat monoculture farmland before you see a river or a mountain range. The trick is to be patient, to understand that you have to go through here to get there. And sometimes you realize later that that "boring" desert is actually beautiful, if you catch it at the right hour in the morning…