One of the toughest things about writing songs is knowing how to judge your own work.

How do you know when you’ve written a good song? How do you know when a song needs rewriting? The answers are never simple.

Any given song has dozens of moving parts: melody, rhyme scheme, song structure, chord progressions, lyric content—it goes on and on.

There are dozens of different ways to get the job done, but dozens of unique ways to go wrong too.

Fortunately, in the face of all that complexity, there are a few simple principles you can use to spot problem areas. Writers have been talking about these 5 “Virtues of Writing” for well over two thousand years—all the way back to Aristotle’s time.

They’re just as useful today as they were back then.

The Five Virtues of Songwriting

1. Correctness. Is your song free of distracting fumbles, sour notes, and other mistakes? And if your song breaks the conventions of its genre, does it do so with good results?
2. Clarity.
   Is your song’s core idea focused and fascinating? Can your listeners understand what your song’s about?
3. Feeling. Does your song stir up actual feeling in the audience? Are you moving them to tears? To laughter?
4. Consistency. Are your choices of melody, harmony, and structure appropriate to the song’s topic?
5. Cleverness. Are you wowing your listeners with beautiful metaphors, harmonies, personification, rhymes? Are you keeping them interested with musical twists and turns of phrase?

These five qualities make a great measuring stick while you write and rewrite songs. They can make or break any tune.

Over the next week or two we’ll look at each of these virtues in detail, examining how each one can help you write stronger, more fascinating songs.