If you sing "John Henry" as many times as Bob Dylan did, you'd have written "Blowin' in the Wind."

I'm reading the full transcript of Bob Dylan's long, rambling speech at that MusiCares event).

[My] songs didn't come out of thin air. I didn't just make them up out of whole cloth.... It all came out of traditional music: traditional folk music, traditional rock 'n' roll and traditional big-band swing orchestra music.

I learned lyrics and how to write them from listening to folk songs. And I played them, and I met other people that played them back when nobody was doing it. Sang nothing but these folk songs, and they gave me the code for everything that's fair game, that everything belongs to everyone.

For three or four years all I listened to were folk standards. I went to sleep singing folk songs. I sang them everywhere, clubs, parties, bars, coffeehouses, fields, festivals. And I met other singers along the way who did the same thing and we just learned songs from each other. I could learn one song and sing it next in an hour if I'd heard it just once.

If you sang "John Henry" as many times as me -- "John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain't nothin' but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I'll die with that hammer in my hand."

If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you'd have written "How many roads must a man walk down?" too.

And if you'd've sung Big Bill Broonzy's "Key to the Highway" — "I've got a key to the highway / I'm booked and I'm bound to go / Gonna leave here runnin' because walking is most too slow" — you'd have written "Georgia Sam he had a bloody nose/Welfare Department they wouldn’t give him no clothes/He asked poor Howard where can I go/Howard said there’s only one place I know/Sam said tell me quick man I got to run/Howard just pointed with his gun/And said that way down on Highway 61."

And "Sail Away Ladies" — "Ain't no use sit 'n cry / You'll be an angel by and by / Sail away, ladies, sail away" — would get you to "Boots of Spanish Leather" — "I'm sailing away my own true love...." And "Roll the Cotton Down" — "Ten dollars a day is a white man's pay / A dollar a day is the black man's pay" — "If you sang that song as many times as me, you'd be writing 'I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more,' too."

So there's the formula. Sing a lot of folk songs, sing enough, until they take a new form and you've got your songs, your Bob Dylan songs. Or, I take it, sing enough Bob Dylan songs, over and over, and out of those will emerge your songs.

Only songs work that way, where you internalize someone else's words so deeply that you develop an instinct for words that yields up new words that count as your words. You can't do that with writing, can you? Maybe with poetry, memorizing it and reciting it over and over. But if you want to write prose, what can you do? You could try the Hunter S. Thompson method:

He used to type out pages from “The Great Gatsby,” just to get the feeling, he said, of what it was like to write that way, and Fitzgerald’s novel was continually on his mind while he was working on “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”....

"You’ve been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books," Bob Dylan sang much more than once, but I don't see how you could ever catch onto an instinct to write like F. Scott Fitzgerald by reading all his books (like The Thin Man) or typing out particular pages (like Hunter S. Thompson) or fixating on individual sentences (as we did here on the blog in the old Gatsby project). I think the language you use to write prose is the language of speech, and you picked that up in a way that was even more fundamental and tradition-based than all those folk songs Bob Dylan had to sing to get to his own songs.

You used to be so amused/At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used...