Learn songwriting to finishing five real songs in six months
Six months of weekly writing — built around one Berklee course, one book, and a hard rule of one finished song per month — gets a beginner from "I have ideas" to a folder of five complete, recorded songs. Roughly 80 hours total. You will not be on the radio. You will have a body of work to point at.
6 months · ~80 hours · five completed songs with verses, choruses, recorded demos
1.Pat Pattison's "Songwriting: Writing the Lyrics" on Coursera
Pat Pattison has taught songwriting at Berklee for forty years. His former students include John Mayer, Gillian Welch, and Tom Hambridge, and his free Coursera course has had over 1.3 million enrollments since 2013. The course covers structure (verse, chorus, bridge), rhyme schemes, prosody, and most importantly the object-writing exercises that train you to write specifics instead of clichés. Six weeks long, free to audit, $49 for the certificate. Audit it.
Free to audit; $49 if you want the Coursera certificate
Songwriting: Writing the Lyrics →2.Writing Better Lyrics by Pat Pattison
The book that pairs with the Coursera course and the actual reference text most working songwriters keep on their shelf. Chapters on object writing, sense-bound writing, rhyme schemes, and stable vs. unstable structures. Read one chapter a week and do every exercise. The "ten-minute object write" exercise alone — set a timer, write everything you can sense about a single object — will change how you write within a month if you do it daily.
~$18 for the second edition
Writing Better Lyrics →3.The "one finished song per month" rule
The most important resource is a deadline. Pick the first of every month. By that date you must have a finished, recorded song — chords, melody, full lyrics, voice memo demo at minimum. Bad songs count. Two-minute songs count. The constraint forces you across the line that 95% of "songwriters" never cross: shipping. Six months of this and you have five completed songs and a much clearer sense of which ideas are yours.
Free
Andrea Stolpe — free Becoming a Songwriter course →If you want one-on-one coaching
Andrea Stolpe is a multi-platinum songwriter who has written for Faith Hill and teaches at USC and Berklee. Her "30-Day Songwriter" program (~$200) is structured daily lessons with assignments, and her quarterly retreats run $1,500–3,000 if you want immersive small-group work. The right choice for someone who already has the Pattison fundamentals and needs personalized feedback to break a plateau.
Why this path
Most beginning songwriters consume YouTube videos about songwriting and never finish songs. The Pattison course gives you the same fundamentals taught at the most respected songwriting program in the world, free, for six weeks. The book is the workbook you will return to for years. The monthly deadline turns everything you learn into actual songs, which is the only metric that matters. Skip the deadline and the rest is theater. Five completed songs in six months is a real catalog you can build a life on.