Thanks guys this is really interesting stuff! I'm getting that book mentioned, a book on chords (They seem far to important not to focus on) and a good electric keyboard.

My worthless advice:

The best way to learn to compose is to compose! Find a medium that you are happy with, and just start writing. Let people listen to your music and take their criticism to heart, and you'll impove!

Don't worry too much about learning the "proper" way to write music. I've been writing for about a year and a half, and it's all been intuitive (no training or anything), and I've noticed a vast improvement in my skills. If I can do it, I'm sure anyone can.

You need to work with your strenghts, I found I'm not a very good person at playing music, i.e performing the wallace and gromit theme tune in frot of my class. But I found, when just sitting by myself I can compose good music, catchy tunes I heard my mother humming later when I hadn't even shown it to her! If your finding it hard find a keyboard, and then a composing software. Use the keyboard to compose maybe the basic tune, the put it in the software, in the software add chords etc.

Writng the music, can take along time or a short time. The good thing for me is I am desgining a video game, and to get a real good feel for an area when drawing I use music sometimes. I was designing a small village, on where it was an autumn, the leaves where gently drifting to the ground, so from there I played round with fonts, on my keyboard, and got a very nice strings instrument, then from there it just snowballed, I made a nice theme, showed to my freinds and described what area it would play in, and they liked it. So I guess what I'm trying to say is, if your having trouble getting started set yourself a theme to base it on. The catchy theme I talked about earlier was designed to be catchey, as the area was that of a mole like race, with quirky customs.

Good luck.

Thanks everyone. I will use all this info as much as I can.

Just wondering now, are their steps to creating a song?