I find it incredibly interesting to hear about other peoples creative processes - thank you for sharing! It's absolutely fascinating that you write in a character, one definitely not you - I have the opposite approach, always trying to come from somewhere within, and always attempting to tell my own stories. Sometimes, it feels almost selfish. I like the character idea; it sounds like a good way to break out of my own rut.

Jenny's last little "juvenile throwaway" is actually a great example... Why did her lyric take me in that direction? Lol, I don't have a freakin' clue! But her threat to just burn it was an invitation to me... permission to examine another angle. Sometimes I think that's the point... If you know you're writing typical, generic, formulaic crap then just go ahead and give yourself permission to write the opposite. Be fearless! Be selfish! Let yourself go too far... just don't let anyone see it lol. THEN, read between your lyrics and write something with deeper meaning. They're just words, and there's a hundred different ways to say the same thing... Find one hundred and one! 🙂

Thirteen Songs on my website: First Lines.

"Cajun Lady": "I got the word from Delacroix, she'd be waitin' in New Orleans."
In that Line is the Singer-Character, "I", and the Love-Interest Character, "she'd", and the 'world', the setting for the story, Delacroix, New Orleans. I'm hooked. I want to know who these people are, what's going on between them. Will he get there? Will boy get girl? How did he 'get the word'? That was an intriguing bit of phraseology that just came into my mind and out of my mouth. Not 'She called', or 'Her mother told me...'. Just that he 'got the word'.

"Goin' Back To New Orleans": "I'm Goin' Back, To New Orleans. My folk need, my helpin' hand."
The Singer-Character, introduced immediately: "I'm". Again, a city, a location, a setting for the story to play out. And an element of Hook Factor in wondering who his 'folk' are and why they 'need' his 'helpin' hand'.  He's there, word 1 in Line 1, telling his story. It's not me. It's a Singer-Character. I get to assume the persona, to 'be' this guy, to walk around in his avatar, and tell his story through his eyes. His folk; not my folk. But I get to be him, making them my folk.

"Hey! Long Gone (Not Just Leavin'": "There is no reason, for breaking up."
A breakup. In the next Line is 'You', the Love-Interest Character. The implication of a Singer-Character, speaking to a Love-Interest Character is evident, early in the Song.
Conflict is a good element in storytelling. Songs where everything's hunky dory can be great. Songs/stories where there's a problem can be intriguing too. Will they/won't they work it out? What went wrong in the first place? 

"Leavin' You": "Get out of the way! I'm goin' home!"
Holy smokes! The Singer-Character is quoting the Love Interest Character and she is mad about something! And she is going home! Of course I'm hooked!

"Momma Don't Tell Me": "Momma don't you tell me what to do."
Uh oh! Momma's in the house and the Singer-Character is telling her...Uh oh! You don't usually tell Momma. Momma tells you. Hook Factor. Psychology. 

"Number On The Wall": "I wrote your Number On The Wall,"
Johnny Rivers was in town and played his Song, "Memphis", where, "My uncle took the message and he wrote it on the wall."
People used to write on the wall by where a telephone was installed, attached to the wall so you couldn't walk around with it. They would put numbers there so they could remember them to 'dial' them after they hung up. Names. Jokes.
That 'act' of writing on the wall stuck with me. The Singer-Character and Love-Interest Character are introduced in the first three words. People. It's all about people. People are interesting, for better or worse.

"Over The River Tonight": "Put on a hat! Take off your coat! Babe, let's you and I rent a boat!
I'll row us, to the Kentucky si-hi-a-hide!"
Someone, the Singer-Character, is addressing someone, 'Babe', a term of endearment, so, likely the Love-Interest Character, right in Line 1. And they're going from somewhere across a river to Kentucky. I live on the Ohio River, in Ohio, and Kentucky is across the river. If I were putting this Song on the market I'd work down through Kentucky, and down through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, where 'the Kentucky side' would be meaningful. 
Kentucky is the only U.S. state to have a continuous border of rivers running along three of its sides—the Mississippi River to the west, the Ohio River to the north, and the Big Sandy River and Tug Fork to the east. That's where I'd promote myself and this Song. That implies West Virginia and Tennessee markets too. But none of that matters more than people, the Singer-Character, the Love-Interest Character, and them talking to 'each other', or at least, him to her. We listen and pretend we're one of them, involved in this Love Story.

"She Said Good Luck (I Hope You Make It)": The title is that Line 1. 'She', 'you', Characters, a wish for luck and 'making it'. What's that about? I'm hooked.
The Line is something Bob Dylan told a reporter in 1965. I put the words in the mouth of a Character.

"She's Comin' Home With Me": "Everybody's watchin' and she doesn't disappoint!"
Why is 'everybody' watching? How might she disappoint? Why is the Singer-Character telling us, the audience, about it? He's not talking to 'her'. He's talking to us. What else does he want to tell us? We're like eavesdroppers, gossip hounds maybe. Inquiring minds want to know more.

"Take It For A Ride:" "Baby, Maybe, It's just a passin' blue, But I love you more, than ever before, tonight."
The Singer-Character, calling someone 'Baby', the Love-Interest character, and declaring love, more than ever before! I wanna know!

"We Could Use A Little Rain": "We Could Use A Little Rain. It wouldn't hurt us a bit."
This has probably been uttered in every language around planet Earth. In the next Line the Singer-Character is instroduced, "I wonder..." and begins to detail the world he lives in, the world of a dirt-poor dirt farmer, and, more importantly, the Love-Interest Character, his wife.

"Yippee Yi Yo": "She said she was lookin' for a cowboy. She asked me if I could play that part."
Again, the Singer-Character is telling us, the audience, about 'She', the Love-Interest Character. Why is 'she' looking for a cowboy? Not an accountant. Not a truckdriver. Not a dentist. A cowboy. 

Human life is all about people. We are people. We're born of people. We can be mildly interested or obsessed with people. We interact with people from birth to death, and all between. And love makes the world go 'round, so Characters who fall in love, have conflict, have fun, make for interesting story-telling.
She said she was looking for an accountant. (The Singer-Character is implied in that he is telling us what 'she' said.)
She had trouble (conflict!) with the IRS.
She said if you're gonna take my case then take it. (There he is; 'you're')
I need to lay down and get some rest. 
And I decided, 'Hey! I could use the money.'
(Nah! I'll stick with the cowboy!)

n

A lot of my inspiration comes from singing to my dogs LOL. They're very tolerant.

Actually, I almost always have a melody in my head of some kind, either of a song I know or just something that comes to me as I'm doing whatever I'm doing. When I was younger, a lot of songs were written in my head walking back from the pub, with my feet taking the part of the rhythm section. Nowadays, it's often because of something I see that leads me to think further. I wrote a song about a beetle trapped in a spider's web, for instance. And sometimes it's a response to the absurdity of the world around us. Of course, half the world doesn't see any absurdity at all, which is, in itself, absurd.

Another source of inspiration which I think is ignored by many songwriters, and especially the lyrics only folks, is the magic in the combination of certain sounds. Alliteration, internal rhymes or even multiple internal rhymes - some sounds or whole phrases are just fun to sing or evocative of a mood. A lyric is not just about meaning or getting your point across. There is beauty or humor in the sound of words and every word is important.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that you should write and write, churning out song after song, improving as you do so. I don't do that. I have to have an idea that I think is really worth pursuing or else, what's the point? I believe you should always ask yourself why you are writing a song - to cause the listener to smile, laugh, think, act or even cry. If there is no convincing answer, there's no reason to do it just because "it's time to write a song." So I don't write a whole lot of songs and I tend to take quite a long time polishing them. That's just me

The Song manufacturers have pretty much turned Nashville into a dead market for me, not that I was ever a big fan. 
But I hear Songs where the title Line is the only good Line. All the others are obviously just Rhyming their way up to be able to sing that one Line. They don't tell a good story. They just Rhyme. And then they get to say that one clever or meaningful or just word-play Line, and they're in the marketplace.
That's enough for some consumers. They don't need meaningful or moving or even a coherent storytelling. Just something new, same old Melody #9, slap a cowboy hat on it and call it country.
Pop music lost my favor. No one played lead guitar any more. All the Songs sounded generic, like each other, a similar dearth of meaningful, moving, intelligent storytelling coherence.
I haven't turned on the radio for days.
One Songwriter who lives in a multimillion dollar house says she writes a Song a day. With her money made she can do that. I wonder how many of the new Songs actually get to market.
There's a mix of inspiration and craft in Songwriting. A certain amount of inspiration may get a Song started, even 'completed' in large degree. Then a bit of crafting, deliberate thinking through of the narrative, the story, the choice of words to tell it can be put into it. Inspiration can be spontaneous. Rewriting can be deliberative, thinking about what would make it interesting, more interesting, most interesting.
There's also the concept of 'fallow'. Farmers sometimes leave fields unplanted with the crop they harvested there the year before, letting it 'lie fallow', planting something that fixes nitrogen in the soil, re-enriches its fertility. Songwriting may go through fallow periods, where the mind is incubating its creativity, moving away from the status quo of a period of creativity, resting, renewing, rejuvenating, lying fallow so when you're ready to write again you can take off in a whole new direction.
Fabricating a Lyric gets easier the more you do it, but the quality always seems to suffer. You give in to Rhyming without substance, Grab-A-Rhyme just to keep moving, and Melodies and prosody that are uninspired, rutted, structures that are boring same-old-same-old four-Line Verses, Chorus, Bridge blah blah blah. It should always be entertaining to you, the Songwriter, the first listener. You should be able to critique and say, "I said that well. I sang that well. That Line intrigued me, hooked my interest, and made me want to know what the next Line might be. That title summed up well, and is the Melody to which it is sung should make it ear-wormy, memorable to listeners.
You don't have to do all this as a formal 'fabrication' or 'manufacturing' practice. It just becomes part of your judgment, the decision-making of the Songwriter. How much Introductory Movement is 'Enough' to serve that function, hooking listener interest until I can start Verse I? How many Lines of Verse I does it take to do the exposition of the story, setting the scene, giving the listener what they need to know to make the Chorus make sense? These judgments should come naturally to you after you've written a few Songs. You should start to sense the timing of Structural Components, the pitch variations distinguishing the Chorus from the Verse, the Lyrical meaning content and its relevance, coherence in a story competent to engage listeners and worthy of being told, and heard.
Writers write. But good writers explore varieties of Song, different genres, sometimes defying classification. Is it jazz? Is it country? Is it Americana or other cultural flavor? Tempo exploration. 4/4/ time. 3/4 time. Others. Subject matter: Love. Love lost. Political or other real world events. Fantasy, fact and fiction, history. The possibilities for a subject to embody in Song are as varied as life itself. The possibilities are endless. In thousands of years of Songwriting we have not exhausted the possibilities.
Don't manufacture. Explore. Write. Write prose, just journaling.
Cathy Heller Reinstein recommends a 'Brain Dump' if you have a Song idea you want to 'manufacture'. Put all the thoughts relevant to the idea on paper. Then begin to sort out the ideas that you think can make the Song. That doesn't mean you're simply fabricating it. It means you're thinking through it, examining what those ideas imply about the fuller 'reality' of those ideas. Odds are the Brain Dump will inspire other things you didn't think of at the time but which came to you as you reread what you put on paper, fleshing out the 'realities' of your fantasy or subject.
Some people even research, studying history to become informed enough to write a Song on something factual.
Explore. Write. Sing. Play. See what comes to you in inspiration, and what you can craft out of it.

Thoughtful post, Gary. "Just something new, same old Melody #9, slap a cowboy hat on it and call it country"- that about sums it up these days. There's a point where "craft" turns into a quasi-industrial process. The resultant widget fits neatly in the machine, but it becomes pretty boring. Nashville producer Larry Beaird does a workshop where he analyzes top country songs and focuses on what they have in common. The writers of these songs are clearly experts at what they do and deserve respect for that, but a large part of that expertise consists of dumbing down their product. Songs have become like those signs outside churches with a cutesy pun. Someone comes up with one clever, or sometimes really not very clever, line and the rest is all just fluff. Those clever hooks were always there in country, but writers used to go to the trouble of building a story around them.

It's not just country. Pop songs that use "topliners" are the same thing on steroids. Some producer lays down a beat and then invites a "topliner" into the studio to stand in a booth and sing over it. The topliner sings just whatever comes into her head until she stumbles on some catchy combination of words and the producer says, "That's it - that's the hook." This actually happens.

I guess music goes through phases. Glam-Rock got bloated and ridiculous, so along came punk in response. Maybe the same will happen with country and pop, although it won't be quite the same. Unlike in those days, good music, really good music, is available to listen to and not even too difficult to find. It's just not likely to be what you hear on mainstream radio or what gets the awards.

"Brain Dump" Lol... I like that! I remember inviting folks to participate in an exercise like that over at the 101... Most just thought I was crazy. However, I must admit, the initial thoughts I tossed out were pretty weird lol, but the resulting song was "Breathe". I wish I still had access to those original lines and thoughts...

Posted by: @japov

"Brain Dump" Lol... I like that! I remember inviting folks to participate in an exercise like that over at the 101... Most just thought I was crazy. However, I must admit, the initial thoughts I tossed out were pretty weird lol, but the resulting song was "Breathe". I wish I still had access to those original lines and thoughts...

I really like that song. Glad it was rescued from the dump 🙂

In an earlier post, I was droning on about the importance of sound in language, not just meaning. I read this today from Eduardo Ballerini, the most celebrated and sought-after audio book narrator, quoted in the New York Times.

As the child of a poet who was always hosting spirited dinner parties with other poets, Ballerini grew up among conversations that were not just wordy, but were about the sound of words. His fascination with prosody frequently carries him along; when he reads aloud, he often appears to be conducting with one hand. “I’ve always heard language in terms of sound as much as meaning,” he says. “A phrase like ‘A bird flew through the window’ is as much about the internal rhyme, ‘flew through,’ as it is about the action described, and I pay attention to both.”

@gavin

I've conducted an experiment of sorts over the past 30 days, testing the theory of churning out a song a day (instead of standing by for inspiration). Personally, I have found that although I have written a couple of songs I consider my best work, I've written many more I consider my worst work. There seems to be some merit to it - I'm learning more about how to write, saving ideas, and sometimes I'll end up with just one verse/chorus I like to be modified later - but the majority feel pushed. 

I raise my glass to you for exploring, experimenting, and paying attention to the results. Good science, 'cause' and 'effect'. 
You may be ready to study some Songs, other peoples', maybe your own, to see what they do 'right' and 'wrong'. Why do you like/dislike them? Dissecting "Something" by George Harrison, simply for Structural comprehension, was interesting to me. It 'modulates', changes from Key of C to Key of A, a 'Change' that renews interest, takes the Song in a new direction. All the Songs on the Sgt. Pepper's album modulate, I'm told. 
Not every Song has to, but some can.
Analysis of Songs can time them; how long is the Introductory Movement? How soon do they commence the Verse? How long is the Verse? How soon to they renew your interest with Change? When do they Repeat? A Song should have Structural Elements of Repetition and Change, to those purposes; Repetition to supply Structure listeners can relate to; Change to keep them listening.
How about some bad Song analysis? What's wrong? Did they keep you waiting too long, too much Repetition? Did they finally Change? Or not? Were the words coherent in 'story' way? Any just Rhyme Lines without adding much to the story? Did the Chorus seem to sum up what the Verse(s) told? Or did they seem like more Verse material, exposition of the story, rather than summing up? Did THE Hook, the title sum up in a few words what the main idea was? Or was it kind of buried in there, no more significant in meaning or position than any other Line, perhaps forgotten by the end of the Chorus?
Studious analysis of your favorites and not-so-favorites can be very educational. These 'lessons' tend to become automatic in your own writing. You don't have to think about whether it is 'time' to get to the Chorus. You sense it. You, the first listener, sense the 'Enough' factor, the 'Not Enough', the 'Too Much', and 'The Enough'.
Keep exploring. Keep experimenting.

@gary-e-andrews

Ah! I do love to study songs, although I could definitely benefit from spending more time in that area. I love the idea of flipping the script and asking why a bad song was bad, thank you for the additional ideas 🙂

And this is just an exercise. You could complete it in a sitting or two or three. 
I suggest analysis of 'Timing':
How long is the Introductory Movement?
How long is the Verse (or Chorus if the Song opens with the Chorus)?
How long does it take to get the Chorus (or Verse, whatever Stanza comes second)?
How long is that second Stanza?
By the end of that second Stanza is THE Hook, the title, clearly obvious?
How many times have they sung that title Line?

I suggest analysis of Lyrical content:
Does the Lyrical content of the first and second Stanzas make sense?
Are the Lines coherent thoughts?
Are the Lines delivered in conversational style?
Are the Lines communicated, 'sent' clearly enunciated so you can 'receive' them, ideally on first listening?
Does THE Hook/title seem to sum up what all the rest of the Lyric seems to be getting at?
Can you spot any Lines that simply seem to Rhyme, without adding much to the storyline?
Are there any 'tangled' Lines, twisted syntax in a way not natural to the way you would say them, perhaps designed to land on a Rhyme-Word?
Mostly analysis can be confined to how you 'hear' the delivery. If looking at a written Lyric do you see any spelling errors, misconstrued words, which might interrupt the flow of 'consumption' as a reader stops to re-read those errors to see what the Lyricist meant to say instead of what they did say?
Does their Rhyme-Scheme seem consistent, Verse to Verse, Rhyming the same Lines in each Verse, Lines one and two, three and four, or one and three, two and four?
Is there Internal Rhyme?
Is there Nursery-Rhyme style, where two Lines might Rhyme and a third Line be left Un-Rhymed, then two more Lines Rhymed, and the Un-Rhymed third Line picked up with Rhyme in Line six? 
Are there Hard-Rhymes, Imperfect- or Soft-Rhymes?
Is there no Rhyme?
Did the Lyric 'move' you in some way, emotionally, intellectually?

What is the overall length of the Song? (Timing)
Did they have a Verse III, or resort to a an Instrumental Bridge, or Lyrical Bridge, and go to a final giving of the Chorus?
Can you clearly hear where each Stanza begins and ends?
Can you lay out the Structure, Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus, Coda?
Or Chorus, Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus, Verse, Coda?
Or Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Chorus, Coda?

I suggest analysis of Arrangement, the musical accompaniment to the vocal:
Do instruments fill some or all the gaps between Lyrical Lines?
Do instruments 'step on' the vocalizations, obscuring the word delivery, playing while the singer is singing?
Is the vocal buried in the mix, the music overwhelming the 'featured' vocal?
Do the Lyrical ideas and musical style seem to match, sad ideas with melancholy music, happy ideas with upbeat music?
Is the vocalist's voice unique in some way, raspy, urgent sounding, emotional, angry, humorous? 

This 'analytical' practice isn't the way we usually listen to music, as fans. It is a 'study' exercise, to educate yourself to make your own judgment calls, as the First Listener to your own Songs. What the Songs you study do right, or wrong, in your opinion, can help you do things right in your own Songs, and avoid doing things wrong.