Dana,

Another good question. It is good to have a target area. When I work with artists and other writers, I will find out the music that inspires them. I always ask three questions:

#1. What STYLE OR TYPE of song is NOT in your catelogue?
#2. Is there a style or particular song you wish you had written?
#3. If you could write a song for anyone, living or dead, who would it be?

The idea is to get into the range of a particular artist or type of song. But knowing that you probably won't get to that particular artist, you are actually looking for people who would be the NEXT artist of that type. Artists are influenced by other people, and studying those people give you a good general direction to go. Sometimes it is just randomly writing, but it does help to narrow the type of song you are doing.

Now you have to have it written in the general voice of a particular artist, the pitch needs to sound like what they do. So being very direct and descriptive in that vein, yet have enough leeway for others is always a great idea. And some times you may have to wait a while. For years, back during the "Travis Tritt/T.Graham Brown" era of music, late 80;s to early/mid 90's, I was hired to do a lot of demos for those pitches. I had the same "blue eyed soul" voice and was considered for a couple of record deals based on that. Then the "Garth era" came along and sidelined a lot of those artists, so that type of music was not pitched as much.
Get on down the road to today, and you find modern artists, Chris Stapelton, Eric Church, etc influenced by those artists, and others that come along are influenced by THOSE artists. So a lot will have to do with timing. And having a pretty wide variety of music.

As an artist you have to be pretty narrow in your focus. As a writer, you should be pretty wide in your focus.

MAB