I'm Guinn. I have a decent musical background and know my basic musical theory.
And I have absolutely no idea how the heck I compose music.
For one thing, I cannot find a melody that suits my desire and whenever I do come to one that I like, I look at it further and find it's basically a copy of a melody I liked from another song. The same goes when I try to create melodies from chord progressions, the chords are exactly like another song. As somewhat of a reference, I'm aiming to compose kind of soundtrack type music and I listen to plenty of John Williams, Hans Zimmer, as well as several Romantic Era composers as well, and somehow whenever I'm trying to create something, they always seem to influence it far too much.
I love it when a song can sound like an emotion, or a color, or create a portrait of a personality (my favorite example of this is John Williams's Leia's Theme from Star Wars).
Can anyone give me some beginner's tips?