Just write from the heart, man.
There's really no formula.
Granted, the greatest art you may think of may very well have been related to personal suffering and pain. Angst begets the best art, doesn't it?
What do people like you [us/me too] have to write about? Clean the pool? Mow the lawn? Having great kids? Hey, Graham Nash already wrote "Teach Your Children".
I'd say, look for some angst to write about, and there's plenty to go around in the world today. It doen't necessarily have to be your angst, you may choose to write in the third person. What you write about may be based on something hypothetical or totally made up. The art of language is totally wide open. You can write practically any song you want, but in the end judgement, it's very hard to write a truly good song. It's probably easy to write just any garbage, but I think it's hard to write something that's really eloquent, that says something substantial. Practice makes perfect, I suppose.
Just hammer away at it. Have fun with songwriting, and experiment with it, to define your style and voice.
Either that, or go hang out in the skid row bars, etc, [go find the bohemian/underground/artist scene] and hook up with a real songwriter, or two. No kidding. Find someone, maybe, that has the angst that you don't have. Haha, no kidding.
I once met these 3 brothers, and they wrote the most clever, funny, interesting, moving 'folk-style' songs I've ever heard. It was like 3 Dylans with a great sense of humor, and they had a fantastic sense of song construction and how to turn a really great phrase. They had a little cult following, and everything, including me, but I produced a few tapes of them. I met them in a skid row bar, haha, no kidding, but it wasn't as bad as it sounds. We were all relatively young, living in the city, and just hanging out, in what was otherwise a skid-row-adjacent artist's community.
I met some really talented songwriters back then, but I still have trouble writing a legitimate song, haha. [I met some kooks, too, haha].
A good song has to be engaging on many different levels. It's hard to put it all together, and make the song work on every level. There's a certain amount of expertise you need, and inspiration, and craft. Songwriting and music, like anything else, takes practice.
I'm sure the greatest songwriters you may think of probably have written dozens of scratch songs before coming up with a real hit,... Dylan, I suppose, has probably written hundreds of songs that we've never heard, etc.
-Just have fun with it, guy. Experiment and practice. It doesn't hurt to meet other good players and/or songwriters. Good luck.
