I've been practicing daily for a couple of years now.

This year I had a pretty big break-thru in terms of coming up with my own music. A big issue i've had is a distaste for learning other people's music. A good guitar song makes me want to play, but not play the song. It's someone else's song! It's one hell of a mindset, but I only look up published songs when I want to know how they created a specific music phrase, and I generally avoid it. I feel strongly about this for some reason.

But I am kind of stuck. I have some chord progressions I play in, and I have a handful of snippets that I always repeat and lean on to give the stuff i'm playing a loose structure, but turning these progressions and "pieces" of song into a proper song is driving me insane because it's not clicking in my head.

I thought maybe I need to find some folks to play with, and yeah, I do, and I've put out feelers locally for people to play with, especially other trans women, but I've also been searching for advice on songwriting.

What I find really isn't helpful. For one, I am not starting with a melody; a ton of this content assumes you are.

Two, a lot of it just really doesn't discuss the- I guess philosophy and approach? Mechanically i'm already at a point where I can play a song, but I haven't been able to self-discover a process for taking my own material and whipping it into shape, and focusing it up?

I have very little formal music education, i've just been playing every day, pick up a chord or two as I experiment, and stringing together sounds that I like, but I'm really keen to find somebody or someone that can help me develop a more functional creative process, and I'm wondering if this comm might have anybody willing/able to help me work through this stuff?