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Lately I've been setting aside an hour every morning for songwriting, before I do anything else. (Yes, I'm still between jobs.) It's been interesting how the task seems to reshape itself each day. For example, a song fragment I came up with a year or two ago:

Last week I sat down with a guitar and wrote enough words for two long verses and a chorus with variations.
A couple of days later I recorded the basic structure into Ableton Live, and discovered it was EIGHT MINUTES LONG and kind of dull. So I spent the rest of that hour figuring out how to throw away half of the words I'd written.
I had in mind a coda consisting of a lot of four-syllable lines, so today I sat down with a sheet of paper, brainstormed sixty-three phrases in three columns, then cut them apart with scissors, grouped them into themes, and arranged the groups that seemed strongest into the structure I needed.

Tomorrow I'll probably record today's results, and find out what I have to fix next.