6♦ Shuffle and cut

6♦ Six of Diamonds in The Rock Songwriter’s Deck: 52 Ways to Write a Song

The Six of Diamonds has a new angle on the old technique of imitating a song that you admire. Imitating a song is slightly tricky: you want to somehow appropriate what's good about the song without copying any actual material from the song.

What makes this challenge easier, according to the Six of Diamonds, is to start with three or four songs that you want to imitate. Instead of working with a single song, round up a whole group of them. Then reshuffle the songs into something new, imitating bits and pieces of each of the songs.

You still want to avoid copying any actual material from any of the songs, but when you have more songs to serve as reference points, it's easy to find a place for your new song to stand — somewhere in the middle of the group of songs, without being too close to any one of them.