I agree wholeheartedly with Bartholomew. Many years ago I was in a songwriting workshop with Geoff Morgan. He said, "Take the next ten minutes and write a song about your shoes." And we did it. (That's where The Wonderful Shoes came from.) I haven't written a song in ten years, but I expect to get back to it now that my life has taken a turn for the simpler, and I expect that I may again make use of the "write a song in ten minutes" technique.

The idea is to get your internal editor to keep quiet, to let the material just come out spontaneously and don't worry about how good it is or isn't until you're done. It often turns out to be a lot better than you might think. And pressure can be an effective tool in that regard. Another tool is the technique proposed by Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones: keep your hand moving. Whatever works for you.

Aloha,
Mark