songwriters--amateur or experienced--share your advice

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Personally for me the best songs, if I feel the luck that most songwriters occasionally or even often have will just come randomly into a perfect development, but forcing the ideas for a song upon yourself obviously puts out a bunch of wordy songs that end up in a pile--at least it does for me. Obviously the best thing to do is walk away and if you have an interesting revelation on life, take notes, try some sample bits of a hook you could turn into a song, maybe even write bits and pieces of a song and write the simple bits time and again until you're happy.

I'm still curious if anyone's learned some other useful advice from writing a song. If you have a sample of a successful song that seems like a good example of an experience and you don't mind sharing it, feel free to do that also.

VW

One of my favourite chord progressions is I - VI - IV - V. Quite a few hit songs have been written with those and their variations. Sometimes, just for kicks and giggles, I way use a progression that steps outside the norm. I used this progression in a song called Walk Into The Light:

Verse: C - Bm - C - F# (2x)
Pre-chorus: Eb - F
Chorus: D - A - D -A - D - A - G

Those three sections repeat again then there's a riff section with these chords:

Riff: Eb - Bb - Cm - Ab - Bb (4x)

The song is also a little challenging because I use about 6 or 7 different strumming and picking techniques for it.