Writing my own "Gravity"

I've been working to finish all the songs for my album. I'm down to the last two, but especially stuck on one of them. I'd like my album to not be completely songs in 4/4 meter and so I decided to write a slow 6/8 song. How hard could that be? I started listening to the one song that I knew would be a good inspiration for me, Gravity by John Mayer. It was hard to go from listening to writing and not constantly hearing Mayer's melody in my head. I was told once that good songwriters create something original, but great songwriters take someone else's idea and make it sound like their own. I haven't found truth in this message yet, but it makes sense to me away from my writing and instruments.
I believe that you cannot force a song out of you. A song writes itself and it comes like waves, in and out of your mind. I've also learned through creating this song that I can force a message into a song. A song is, in a sense, out of my control and I am just the deliverer of the song. I've tried to write lyrics that revolve around my idea of hope, but they don't sound right. I don't know where this will take me, but I'm certainly feeling the gravity of this song. Maybe that's what the song is about.