Many thanks to Dave, Bert and all.....It was getting a bit too peaceful round here.

I find it very interesting to hear how other people go about writing and why. I mean why write songs? Are there not enough good ones around already? Why not leave it to proper songwriters? How do you know if they are any good? When you perform do you have to sing all of your own material? If you don't, then who will? Just because it's original dosn't make it good. Just because it's original dosn't make it bad either.

There is also this artist thing that comes up. If you are known to everybody as 'Joe the Postman' and you appear at your local sing-around with a song you have composed, it seems to be very difficult for people to take the song on its merits. If you get any reaction at all it tends to be on the lines of "oh you wrote that youself". If you performed the same song and introduced it as an obscure Eric Bogle, John Prine or Richard Thompson song, no matter how poorly you performed it, it would probably be more easy to accept. I never have actually tried it though but I would be interested to hear from anyone who has. If you work away at it long enough though, you do eventually become known as 'that Joe the Postman who writes songs'.

The above dosn't apply in the case of the places you go that are geared up for the budding 'singer-songwriter' but they present different problems. I would be interested in hearing your experience of these, as they don't seem to be too common in the U.K.

As for the why, I think Bert covered that very well. When it works like that it makes it all worth while. It's just as likely to happen though, that when you have sung a song by one of the writers mentioned above, that someone will approach you and say "did you write that one then"? !*+#! Has that ever happened to you?

The most important thing for me though is to have something to say, then you have the best reason to write a song. When I look back at what I have written here I never quite seem to be able to say what I mean. Someone always seems to focus on what I would consider to be minor point, or I just seem to confuse the issue entirely.

I just seem to be able to say it better in song somehow.

When I first started I seemed to think that the music had to be complicated and have lots of difficult chords to be original. I would pass over what I thought to be simple or obvious melodies before I realised that they we only simple and obvious to me! I am now going though my 'minimilist' stage, which means two chords only. As was said by Dave and Bert, they seem to be the ones that write themselves. I am aiming to do a one chord song next.

To sum up I would like to say that writing songs is not too difficult, the difficult bit is being able to write a good song and knowing how to recognise it..... What makes a good song?