Sometimes, you don’t really know what you know until you have to explain it to someone, and then you struggle to articulate what you’ve known for yourself in a way that makes sense to someone else. In so doing, one is forced to fill in the gaps, and what had been somewhat fuzzy becomes more clear.

Another approach is to observe the work of others and interpret it in a way that explains a process that could be used to achieve a similar result. Music critics analyze musical compositions by explaining the structure of a piece, which leads to the idea that the composer actually composed the music through that very process. That the composer used such a process might be news to the composer, but that the interpretation is valid on that level remains true. A songwriter can read such a critique and realize that, intuitively, he does the same thing, and in so doing, is among the best company.

Otherwise, a non-musical person who wants to compose music but doesn’t know how can read that critique and, being the right person to read that critique, being the person with the exact questions that have the exact answers in that critique, he’ll have the intuition that here is the process he’s been looking for.

How does one write a song? A baffling question, but, in fact, there is an answer. I have a little 25-cent booklet of daily Lent meditations I’ve read every Lent for decades, so some its wisdom is ingrained in my mind. “Try to catch yourself unawares,” it says. “How do your thoughts naturally run?” Sometimes you say something and think, “I should write that down!” The late Captain Beefheart would order his wife to write down things he said, even things apparently only he found profound.

Our minds are overrun with verbiage, with vowels that have their different sounds and frequencies, consonants that have their own percussive signatures. Phrases run through the head, one overhears conversations, always with beats and rhythms, sometimes with melodies, and the inner musician spots a line and declares, “That’s a song!”

“Where are you going?” “Where are” both are the same note, “you” is emphasized and is up a tone, and “going” is the lowest note in the line, with an emphatic character that communicates that the phrase is complete. Spoken, it has elements of melody. When one focuses on that, he can repeat the line four or so times, conscientiously singing it. You can sing it into your phone, so you don’t have to immediately, permanently remember it.

One remembers reviews of classical pieces in concert programs. A certain piece begins with a single note, or a sequence of two, three, four or more notes, in a certain key, on a certain instrument. Those notes are then played in other keys on other instruments, sometimes not all of the notes, sometimes with those notes used as the basis for a more complex series of notes. Perhaps one or two of the notes are singled out as the building blocks of alternative blocks of music. The gist is that one starts with a little thing, and conscientiously explores and works with that until a whole composition has been built. This is a process a musician can use.

Another process is to start with that one line one has seized upon, and recite that over and over in one’s mind until the next development in the piece naturally occurs. Sometimes this doesn’t work.

If one has a lyric, one can simply follow the practice of composing four lines for a verse. My problem has been that when I absent-mindedly come up with a line and proclaim that it’s a song, I’ll write out the whole verse, and three more verses, and all 16 lines have the same melody, in the same key. It’s a song, but instead of verses and a chorus, it’s just four choruses, and I’d rather have the verses too.

This is where the classical music concert programs come in handy. I can take my initial line of fourteen syllables and break the melody down into three segments: beginning, middle, end. One verse’s first line will work with the three notes in the middle of the melody, the second line works with the two notes at the beginning of the melody, the third line works with the four notes in the end of the melody, and the final line is, finally, the whole melody. In the second verse, I can start with the end, move to the beginning, go to the middle, and finish with the whole. In the third verse, I can begin with the whole, go to the middle, then to the beginning, then to the end. The listener gets glimpses of the whole, and the whole itself at some point in each verse, wondering all the while how the culmination of the melody will finally appear. To provide that catharsis, which the composer himself is the most anxious of all to achieve, the chorus will be the whole melody repeated with each of the four lines, but sung an octave higher.

What to do with the bass, guitar, and keyboards? They can follow the example of the singer, and play around with the elements of the melody, playing the notes in different combinations, in different keys, playing off what the other instruments are doing, taking turns playing different parts. As one rehearses it all in one’s head, certain elements will become predominant, and one can emphasize those. The different characters of the different instruments will suggest departures particular to that particular instrument.

It can all begin with a simple beat, a simple rhythm, a simple melody. Tinkering provides additional material, and the whole mind brings it all together into a finished song, and with a little help from one’s friends– the critics– the world gains a neat little tune about the pleasures of watching a beetle crawl across a sidewalk.