How To Write Music

I wrote this to a musician friend who could play and sing, but didn't think they could write their own music and then I decided to share it here as well:

I think writing music requires a willingness to make mistakes and not only accept them, but explore them for possibilities. Most of the process of making good new music is not making good music but doing things that don't work. If you're doing something that always works, you're mostly doing things you know will work and therefore not really going unexpected and original places. But the willingness to spend a lot of time making what sounds like mistakes or being wrong is something which is scared out of most of us unfortunately. I think often it's a process of hunting for a sound that brings out some ideas or emotions and then exploring it from there.