Coping strategies for a lack of talent

So I am doing my best to dive headfirst into the songwriting aspect of the music. What is bouncing around in my head right now is thus:

Songwriting is hard. For me, anyway. I write short stories for fun every once in a while and I used to referee various pen and paper games back in high school, which was a great creative outlet. Basically you wrote a script, story and characters you were proud of for your friends to trample haphazardly over and do exactly what you didn't expect them to, forcing you to think fast to keep the story on track and keep them entertained. But usually I only wrote when an idea really stuck in my head begging to be let out on paper. As the working world and my love of stiff drink grinds my consciousness away a little bit at a time, those ideas get rarer and rarer. Maybe things will change now that I'm in school again for a subject that genuinely interests and challenges me...Time will tell I suppose. But for now at least, I have to chip away at a song, a little bit at a time.

I tried my hand at songwriting a long time ago, back in high school, and hated everything I managed to come up with and scrapped it almost as soon as I had it on paper. I think my block was that I was trying to write down an avenue that my brain just couldn't wrap around, the way that bands like Tool, Pantera, and Slayer wrote. More recently I've been into bands like Isis, Baroness, Mastodon, and High on Fire, which largely have a very abstract way of writing lyrics compared to what I was usually listening to in the 90s. Some of it is almost stream-of-consciousness ramblings. Now that I've seen that you can actually make good songs out of that type of narrative, it's coming a little easier to me now. The structures of a few are coming together, so far what I do is pick a topic that seems like it has potential in the form of aggressive music, jot down a few concepts and try to reword them into verse. I'm trying to keep my mind on track with these three, tentatively named:

Mill of Ares
The novel Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield is what really inspired me on this one. If you've never read Gates of Fire, it's the book that Frank Miller read, then when he put it down he was like "HEY I THINK I'LL WRITE ANOTHER GRAPHIC NOVEL" and 300 was born. Then turned into a movie. Seriously, he basically just took out the 'boring' stuff and drew pictures over the story. The concept I'm focusing on with the song is the Spartan's outlook on warfare and the philosophy they had that, when paired with their incredible conditioning, made them the undisputed masters of the battlefield in their time. They treated war as a job, a task to be toiled at and accomplished with hard work rather than any great amount of skill at arms. They of course did value courage, valor, and martial skill, these came with the territory of a warrior society, but warcraft was an inevitable chore to them rather than something to be dreaded. Of course a song about Spartans gives a great opportunity to come up with stuff to yell on stage, too.

Cryptid Coil
This song is the one that's coming easiest to me, I'm basically writing about my own weird obsession with cryptozoological creatures. Bigfoot, the Mongolian Death Worm, El Chupacabra, stuff like that...The idea of insanely deadly creatures defying the efforts of the modern world to find them by lurking in the shadowy remote places of the earth is supremely entertaining to me, even if I don't necessarily believe it.

Ragged Tooth
This one is about sharks.

Anyway, this is all me groping in the dark, I have no real impression of music to write over so using anything I came up with right now would just be trying to cram words into the structure of the song. Our next practice session is going to be focused pretty much exclusively on new material, so while I probably won't have much to do it will go a long way in giving me something in my mind to build lyrics around rather than cramming them into something after the fact.