As I’ve used this process again and again, I’ve noticed that if I go out of order or skip a step, it no longer works for me nearly as well. So before jumping forward to this step, make sure you’ve really done a thorough job of gathering your raw materials. Each step compounds the next.

In this step, we work through our raw material.

Go through the different words and phrases in your list and turn them over in your mind. What associations do you have? What life experiences, memories, stories, connotations, facts, and ideas come to you? It can also help to pair words together from your list, and search for ideas in those pairings. James Webb Young describes excellently what this process feels like:

Little tentative or partial ideas will come to you. Put these down on paper. Never mind how crazy or incomplete they seem: get them down. These are foreshadowings of the real idea that is to come, and expressing these in words forwards the process.

When you’ve really worked through your key words and ideas, you’re ready. The wheels should be spinning in your mind; you’ve focused deeply on everything around the subject of your lyric, and most of the time, after so much focus and brainstorming, everything will jumble together in your mind so you feel as though you can barely think.

Good! That’s exactly what should happen. This gets your subconscious working hard on the problem in the background, ready to deliver up fresh creative ideas. So now, we’re ready for the third step.