Hah! I remember that... I was still a kid, I really wanted to write a music composition program. One attempt after the other, this giant, monolithic piece of spaghetti. I just could not be done. Around the 700 or 800 line mark I lost overview and it would grind to a halt forever more subtle bugs to fix.

This went on for weeks, maybe even months.

Then a friend told me the magic words: "structured programming". I went to the library and read a book (I forgot the title, I think it was by Wirth).

Within 3 days I had it up and running.