A few months ago I stumbled over a series of lyric articles in the Sound on Sound magazine, and they're all available online- giving many good ideas on how to approach lyric writing.

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec00/articles/lyric.asp
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan01/articles/lyric.asp
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb01/articles/lyric.asp
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/mar01/articles/lyric.asp
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr01/articles/lyric.asp

Hope you find them as interesting as I did,

Dan

'Interesting' is definitely the right word for it. I won't say 'good' because I'm a bit disapproving of 'how-to' guides for writing lyrics.
Still, he's done a better job than most.
I have to say I particularly hate it when people offer 'tricks' and the like for getting a song started (like his idea of basing it off the inverse of another lyric). That to me stops it from being an art form and starts turning it into a construction project.

Well yes, I see what you mean and songwriting should definitely not be turned into a construction project. I found this series very helpful though when I found myself in a 'writer's block' for several weeks, and it made me see lyrics in a new way. Just the thought of basing your writing on other things than personal experiences and writing songs in different forms I found very interesting, and that hadn't really occured to me in such a scale before.

Just started reading through them now, thanks for the links

Interesting to read this:

Yes indeed! Some just write lyrics to fit with the song or lyrics that sound good, and some treat it more as poetry, and nothing is wrong in my opinion. But I prefer writing lyrics that have some meaning to me, and I try to write in a visual kind of way. How about you?

Happy reading. 

Habing a good old smoke usually get the writers block to bugger off for me 

Traditionally fairly automatically (ie automatic writing) whilst working on melody which usually made some sort of sense but didn't stand up to lyrical scrutiny.

I've been leaning towards trying the brain storming/mind mapping approach then working that into a lyric so it was good to read about in the link articles.