You should ask your self what your level of ambition is. Personally I have found that if I am going to write lyrics, then I am going to do it properly. Which means it is more than an afterthought, something that you add to the music.
I have read a couple of books that I would recommend you to check out. It's "Write Better Lyrics" by Pat Pattison and "Shortcuts to Hit Songwriting" by Robin Frederick.
What these books have in common is the notion that lyric writing is not only an art, it's also - perhaps mostly - a craft. There's a technique to be learned. A technique of communicating a message or a story effectively during the time span of a song.
Of course it's always easier to say "it's art - it can't be learned". When someone writes a book on a sucject like this and says "here's how you do it", you can always find exceptions to the rules, and often the advice seem way to rigid. However I think you can gain a grat deal from books like these if you approach them as an open minded and critical reader, taking from them what you can use. You need to be able to understand under what premise the book is written and understand the context of the book in that light.
For instance "Write better lyrics" seems to have been written upon the premise that lyrics are something you write seperately and often before the music. That a writer works together with a composer. Also it seems to be influenced a lot from the Nashville school, and if you listen to some of the songs that can be found on Pattison's homepage, they're - in my opininon - quite tasteless. But he sure knows the mechanism of a lyric.
What I've gained from this book is for instance to build a "lyric worksheet", to do ten minutes of "object writing" almost every day, and I have gotten a refreshing new way of looking at rhymes, namely inperfect rhymes. And a lot more actually.
The "Shortcuts..." book is made for HIT songwriting. The goal is to learn to make what the radio wants. This goes to far in my opinion, because, while I agree that a song should communicate clearly and that it's a good thing to make something people like, I simply don't like the kind of songs that are the role models in this book. I find them to be almost obtrusive.
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