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Lyrics

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Lyrics

To be a good lyricist, you need to be a good writer. Just like most things, practice will make you improve. It is the same thing with writing. There are some exercises that can help you get better at writing lyrics.

Object Writing

You arbitrarily pick an object, any object, a real object, and focus your senses on it. Use your senses, visual, smell touch, taste, and sound. There are a couple of other senses you may not be aware of known as organic sense and kinesthetic sense.

Organic Sense

Organic sense is your awareness of inner bodily functions, for example, heartbeat, pulse, muscle tension, stomach aches, cramps, breathing, etc...

Kinesthetic Sense

Kinesthetic sense is, roughly, your sense of relation to the world around you. When you get seasick or drunk, the world around you blurs. When the train you're sitting on is standing still, but the one next to it starts moving, your kinesthetic sense goes crazy.

Making Metaphors

Metaphors are one of the mainstays of good lyric writing; indeed most of creative writing uses them extensively. Conflict is essential for metaphors. Put things that don't belong together literally. There are three types of metaphor:

Expressed Identity Metaphor

Asserts an identity between two nouns, e.g. fear is a shadow; a cloud is a sailing ship. Expressed identity comes in three forms:

• X is Y - Fear is a shadow
• The Y of X - The shadow of fear
• X's Y - Fear's shadow

Qualifying Metaphor

Adjectives qualify nouns; adverbs qualify verbs. Friction within these relationships creates metaphor, e.g. hasty clouds; to sing blindly

Verbal Metaphor

Formed by conflict between the verb and it's subject and / or object, e.g. clouds sail; he tortured his clutch; frost gobbles summer down.

Playing in Keys

Like musical notes, words can group together in close relationships, like belonging to the same key. Call this a diatonic relationship. For example, here are some random words that are diatonic to, or in the same key as: Tide - ocean; moon; recede; power; beach; perpetual; ebb; flow. This is playing the key of "tide", where tide is the fundamental tone or tonic note. This is a way of creating collisions between elements that have the at least something's in common, a fertile ground for metaphor. There are many other keys that "tide" can belong to when something else is the fundamental tone or tonic note. For example if the tonic note is "power" - tide; avalanche; storm; hurricane; tornado; army; socket; nuclear; etc... All of these words are related to each other by virtue of their relationship to the word "power". Combining these words together, it is possible to discover good metaphors. For example:

• An avalanche is an army of snow.
• This army is the tornado of our revolution.
• A socket holds back the tides of electricity.

Key of "Moon"

stars; harvest; lovers; crescent; astronauts; calendar; tide; waning; waxing.

• The Nevada sky is a rich harvest of stars
• Evening brings a harvest of lovers to the beach.
• The lovers' feelings waned to a mere crescent.
• The crescent of human knowledge grows with each astronaut's mission.
• A new calendar washes in a tide of opportunities.

Essentially, metaphor works by revealing some third thing that two ideas share in common. One good way of finding metaphors is by asking these two questions:

• What characteristics does my idea "tide" have?
• What else has those characteristics?

Answering the second question usually releases a flood of possible metaphors. Often the relationship between two ideas is not clear until you recognize the linking term.

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Exercise To Create Metaphors

Make an arbitrary list of five interesting adjectives and five interesting nouns.

Example:

Adjectives	Nouns
Smokey	Conversation
Refried	Railroad
Decaffeinated	Rainbow
Hollow	Rain Forest
Understated	Eyebrows

Take any combination and try to write a sentence or short paragraph about them.
The following are a list of all the possible combinations:

Use the combinations in a short sentence of paragraph:

• Since you left, everything seems dull and lifeless.
• My days have been bleached of sound and color.
• Even the rainbow today has been decaffeinated.
• The nights were dull and listless, filled with banal refried conversation.

Metaphor Tool

The following tool makes it a bit easier to find good metaphors than writing them down

Results

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Building Worksheets

Worksheets can be a helpful tool to writing good lyrics. Collecting everything about the subject in one place can help as a basis for working out ideas without having to pluck them from thin air.

Worksheet Tools

Dictionary	Understanding the meaning of words is important. Unintentional misuse of language can be embarrassing.
Thesaurus	Using a thesaurus, one set up according to Roget's original plan according to the flow of ideas, is a setup perfect for brainstorming. Use of synonyms can break up the monotony of rehashing the same old cliche term. It may also be easier to rhyme if necessary.
Rhyming Dictionary	A rhyming dictionary can be a lyrisist and poet's best friend.
Notebook	You'll need something to write your ideas down. Many songwriters keep notebooks for both working on an existing idea for a song, and for jotting down ideas that come to mind.

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Focus Your Lyric Idea As Clearly As You Can

Let's say you want to write about homelessness. Sometimes you'll start the lyric from an emotion: "That homeless woman with everything she owns in a shopping cart really touches me. I want to write a song about her." Sometimes you'll write from a cold calculated idea: "I'm tired of writing love songs, I wan to do one on a serious subject, maybe homelessness." Or you may write from a title you like, maybe, "Risky Business". Then the trick is to find an interesting angle on it, perhaps: "What do you do for a living?" "I survive on the streets." "That's a pretty risky business." In each case, it's up to you to find the angle, brainstorm the idea, and create the world the idea will live in. Object writing is the key to developing choices. You must dive into your vaults of sense material, those unique and secret places, to find out what images you've stored away, in the present example, around the idea of homelessness.

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Object Write About The Subject.

Look though the writing, did you find an expressive image, like a broken wheel on her shopping cart, that can serve as a metaphor, a vehicle to carry your feelings. Did you see some situation, like your parents fighting, that seems to connect you with her situation? These expressive objects or situations are what T.S. Eliot calls "Objective Correlatives" - objects anyone can touch, smell, see that correlate with the emotion you want to express. Broken wheels or parents fighting work nicely as objective correlatives. When you find a good idea, don't stop at just one. Write down the good idea on a separate sheet of paper or in a separate digital file.

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Make A List Of Words That Express Your Idea

Using a thesaurus, one set up according to Roget's original plan according to the flow of ideas, a setup perfect for brainstorming. Write down a list of relevant words. Pair down the list if it's too big. Consider the vowel sounds of each word and organize them accordingly.

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Look Up Each Word In A Rhyming Dictionary.

Be sure to include imperfect rhyme types, and to select only words that connect with your ideas. Avoid cliché rhymes.

Rhyme Types

Remember lyrics are sung, not read or spoken. When you sing, you exaggerate vowels. And since rhyme is a vowel connection, lyricists can make sonic connections in ways other than perfect rhyme.

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Perfect Rhyme

1. The syllables' vowel sounds are the same.
2. The consonant sounds after the vowels, if any, are the same.
3. The sounds before the vowels are different.

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Family Rhyme

1. The syllables' vowel sounds are the same.
2. The consonant sounds after the vowels belong to the same phonetic families.
3. The sounds before the vowels are different.

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Additive Rhyme

1. The syllables' vowel sounds are the same.
2. One of the syllables add extra consonants after the vowel.
3. The sounds before the vowel are different.

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Subtractive Rhyme

1. The syllables' vowel sounds are the same.
2. One of the syllables adds extra consonants after the vowel.
3. The sounds before the vowels are different.

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Assonance Rhyme

1. The syllables' vowel sounds are the same.
2. The consonant sounds after the vowels are unrelated.
3. The sounds before the vowels are different.

Verse Development

Songs are often like short stories. Story writing is structured. The idea is to build up interest throughout the narrative. You don't want to spoil the ending so you save it for last. Keep your listeners interested all the way through your song. Use basic story telling to set up interest in what is going to happen.

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Writing Stories

Story based songs can be developed much like the acts in a play or a film. An act is a major division of a theatre work, including a play, film, opera, or musical theatre, consisting of one or more scenes.

Three-Act Plays

In a three-act play, each act usually has a different mood. In the most commonly used structure, the first act has a lot of introductory elements (that is, who, what, when, where, why, and how); the second act is usually the darkest, with the antagonists having a greater compass; and the third act has a resolution (denouement), often with the protagonists prevailing.

Act One	The conflict of the story is discovered. The exposition, the introduction of the protagonist and other characters that the protagonist meets, take place, as well as the dramatic premise and inciting incident (the incident that sets the events of the story in motion) occurs approximately halfway through the first act.
Act Two	The main character encounters an obstacle that prevents the character from achieving his or her dramatic need. This is known as the complication. The main character reaches his or her lowest point, seems farthest from fulfilling the dramatic need or objective, and seems to have no way to succeed.
Act Three	The climax occurs as well as the resolution (denouement), a brief period of calm at the end of a play where a state of equilibrium returns.

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Five-Act Plays

Until the 18th century, most plays were divided into five acts. The work of William Shakespeare, for example, generally adheres to a five-act structure.

Introduction	The setting is fixed in a particular place and time, the mood is set, and characters are introduced. A backstory may be alluded to. Introduction can be conveyed through dialogues, flashbacks, characters' asides, background details, in-universe media, or the narrator telling a back-story.
Rise	An exciting force begins immediately after the exposition (introduction), building the rise in one or several stages toward the point of greatest interest. These events are generally the most important parts of the story since the entire plot depends on them to set up the climax and ultimately the satisfactory resolution of the story itself.
Climax	The climax is the turning point, which changes the protagonist's fate. If things were going well for the protagonist, the plot will turn against them, often revealing the protagonist's hidden weaknesses. If the story is a comedy, the opposite state of affairs will ensue, with things going from bad to good for the protagonist, often requiring the protagonist to draw on hidden inner strengths.
Return or Fall	During the Return, the hostility of the counter-party beats upon the soul of the hero. Freytag lays out two rules for this stage: the number of characters be limited as much as possible, and the number of scenes through which the hero falls should be fewer than in the rise. The return or fall may contain a moment of final suspense: Although the catastrophe must be foreshadowed so as not to appear as a non sequitur, there could be for the doomed hero a prospect of relief, where the final outcome is in doubt.
Catastrophe	The catastrophe ("Katastrophe" in the original) is where the hero meets his logical destruction. Freytag warns the writer not to spare the life of the hero. Despite Denouement being attested as first appearing in 1752, it was not used to refer to dramatic structure until the 19th century.

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List Of Some Story Based Songs

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Character Types

Stories tend to involve a cast of characters. It wouldn't very interesting if they were all alike. Good story telling involves multiple characters with varying traits.

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The Protagonist

A protagonist, one who plays the first part, chief actor, is the main character of a story. The protagonist makes key decisions that affect the plot, primarily influencing the story and propelling it forward, and is often the character who faces the most significant obstacles. If a story contains a subplot, or is a narrative made up of several stories, then each subplot may have its own protagonist.

The protagonist is the character whose fate is most closely followed by the reader or audience, and who is opposed by the antagonist. The antagonist will provide obstacles and complications and create conflicts that test the protagonist, and revealing the strengths and weaknesses of the protagonist's character.

Types of Protagonists

Hero / Heroine	In literary terms, a hero (masculine) or heroine (feminine) protagonist is typically admired for their achievements and noble qualities. Heroes are lauded for their strength, courage, virtuousness, and honor, and are considered to be the "good guys" of the narrative.   Examples include DC Comics' Superman (hero) and Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games (heroine).
Antihero	An antihero (sometimes spelled as anti-hero) or antiheroine is a main character in a story who lacks conventional heroic qualities and attributes such as idealism, courage, and morality. Examples include Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye and Jay Gatsby from The Great Gatsby.
Tragic hero	A tragic hero is the protagonist of a tragedy. Examples include Oedipus from Oedipus Rex and Prince Hamlet from Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Villain Protagonist	The protagonist is not always conventionally good. Contrasting the hero protagonist, a villain protagonist is a protagonist who is a villain, driving the story forward regardless of the evil qualities the main character has. These traits can include being cruel, malicious, and wicked.
Supporting Protagonist	When a supporting protagonist appears, the story is told from the perspective of a character who appears to be minor. This character may be more peripheral from the events of the story and are not as involved within the "main action" of the plot. The supporting protagonist may be telling the story while viewing another character as the main influence of the plot.   Examples include Nick from The Great Gatsby and Bilbo Baggins from The Hobbit.

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The Antagonist

An antagonist is a character in a story who is presented as the chief foe of the protagonist.

Types of Antagonists

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Heroes and Villains

The antagonist is commonly positioned against the protagonist and their world order. While most narratives will often portray the protagonist as a hero and the antagonist as a villain, like Harry Potter (Character) and Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter, the antagonist does not always appear as the villain. In some narratives, like Light Yagami and L (Death Note) in Death Note, the protagonist is a villain and the antagonist is an opposing hero.

Antagonists are conventionally presented as making moral choices less savory than those of protagonists. This condition is often used by an author to create conflict within a story. This is merely a convention, however. An example in which this is reversed can be seen in the character Macduff from Macbeth, who is arguably morally correct in his desire to fight the tyrant Macbeth, the protagonist.

Examples from television include J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman) from Dallas and Alexis Colby (Joan Collins) from Dynasty. Both became breakout characters used as a device to increase their shows' ratings.

Other Characters

Characters may be antagonists without being evil - they may simply be injudicious and unlikable for the audience. In some stories, such as The Catcher in the Rye, almost every character other than the protagonist may be an antagonist.

Aspects Of The Protagonist

An aspect or trait of the protagonist may be considered an antagonist, such as morality or indecisiveness.

Non-personal

An antagonist may not always be a person or people. In some cases, an antagonist may be a force, such as a tidal wave that destroys a city; a storm that causes havoc; or even a certain area's conditions that are the root cause of a problem. An antagonist also may or may not create obstacles for the protagonist. Societal norms or other rules may also be antagonists.

Usage Of Antagonist

An antagonist is used as a plot device, to set up conflicts, obstacles, or challenges for the protagonist. Though not every story requires an antagonist, it often is used in plays to increase the level of drama. In tragedies, antagonists are often the cause of the protagonist's main problem, or lead a group of characters against the protagonist; in comedies, they are usually responsible for involving the protagonist in comedic situations.

Archenemy

An archenemy (or arch-enemy) is the main enemy of someone. In fiction, it is a character who is the hero's (or protagonist's) most prominent and most-known enemy.

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Point Of View

Narrative point of view. A variety of different theoretical approaches have sought to define point of view in terms of person, perspective, voice, consciousness, and focus. Narrative perspective is the position and character of the storyteller, in relation to the narrative. Who's talking? First person, second person, third person?

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First Person

A first-person point of view reveals the story through an openly self-referential and participating narrator. First person creates a close relationship between the narrator and reader, by referring to the viewpoint character with first person pronouns like I and me (as well as we and us, whenever the narrator is part of a larger group). That is, the narrator openly acknowledges their own existence. Frequently, the first-person narrator is the protagonist, whose inner thoughts are expressed to the audience, even if not to any of the other characters. A first person narrator with a limited perspective is not able to witness or understand all facets of any situation. Thus, a narrator with this perspective will not be able to report the circumstances fully and will leave the reader with a subjective record of the plot details.

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Second Person

The second-person point of view is a point of view where the audience is made a character. This is done with the use of second-person pronouns like you. The narrator may be literally addressing the audience, but more often the second-person referent of these stories is actually some character within the story. Novels in second person are comparatively rare; rather, this point of view tends to be mostly confined to songs and poems.

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Third Person

In the third-person narrative mode, the narration refers to all characters with third person pronouns like he, she, or they, and never first- or second-person pronouns. This makes it clear the narration is done without the need for a narrator who is identified and personified as a character within the story. For the purpose of comparison to stories that have a narrator, third-person narration is described as having an anonymous narrator.

Traditionally, third-person narration is the most commonly used narrative mode in literature. It does not require that the narrator's existence be explained or developed as a particular character, as would be the case with a first-person narrator. It thus allows a story to be told without detailing any information about the teller (narrator) of the story. Instead, a third-person narrator is often simply some disembodied commentary, rather than a fully developed character.

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Rhythmic Meter

In music, Meter refers to the regularly recurring patterns and accents such as bars and beats. Unlike rhythm, metric onsets are not necessarily sounded, but are nevertheless implied by the performer (or performers) and expected by the listener.

Western music inherited the concept of Meter from poetry, where it denotes: the number of lines in a verse; the number of syllables in each line; and the arrangement of those syllables as long or short, accented or unaccented. The first coherent system of rhythmic notation in modern Western music was based on rhythmic modes derived from the basic types of metrical unit in the quantitative Meter of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry.

Later music for dances such as the pavane and galliard consisted of musical phrases to accompany a fixed sequence of basic steps with a defined tempo and time signature. The English word "measure", originally an exact or just amount of time, came to denote either a poetic rhythm, a bar of music, or else an entire melodic verse or dance involving sequences of notes, words, or movements that may last four, eight or sixteen bars. Meter is related to and distinguished from pulse, rhythm (grouping), and beats:

Meter is the measurement of the number of pulses between more or less regularly recurring accents. Therefore, in order for meter to exist, some of the pulses in a series must be accented—marked for consciousness - relative to others. When pulses are thus counted within a metric context, they are referred to as beats.

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Poetry Meter

In poetry, meter is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse meter, or a certain set of meters alternating in a particular order. The study and the actual use of meters and forms of versification are both known as prosody.

When you first start learning music, especially when you're learning from chord charts with lyrics, you'll notice that more often than not, words are separated by their syllables to coincide with the time of the music. This is because music lyrics are often poetic and adhere to a rhythm.

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Iambic

An iamb or iambus is a metrical foot used in various types of poetry. Originally the term referred to one of the feet of the quantitative meter of classical Greek prosody: a short syllable followed by a long syllable (as in "a-bove"). This terminology was adopted in the description of accentual-syllabic verse in English, where it refers to a foot comprising an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (as in a-bove).

In accentual-syllabic verse an iamb is a foot that has the rhythmic pattern: da - DUM

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Types of Iambic Meter

Dimeter	Iambic dimeter is a meter referring to a line consisting of two iambic feet.
Trimeter	Iambic trimeter is a meter referring to a line consisting of three iambic feet.
Tetrameter	Iambic tetrameter is a meter referring to a line consisting of four iambic feet.
Pentameter	Iambic Pentameter is a meter referring to a line consisting of five iambic feet:
Hexameter	Iambic hexameter is a meter referring to a line consisting of six iambic feet.
Heptameter	Iambic Heptameter is a meter referring to a line consisting of seven iambic feet.

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Rhyme Scheme

Rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhyming words in the lyrics. In a four line phrase, there are a few possibilities. If we label the lines 1, 2, 3 and 4:

• Line 1 rhymes with line 2, 3 and 4.
• Line 1 rhymes with line 3, line 2 rhymes with line 4.
• Line 1 and 3 don't rhyme, line 2 rhymes with line 4.

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Building Structure with Prosody

Prosody means reading with expression, with the appropriate rhythm, tone, pitch, pauses, and stresses for the text. Prosody depends on both accuracy and rate. In order to read with expression, a person must be able to read words efficiently and break the text into meaningful syntactic and semantic units.

Your tools for designing your lyric's shapes are phrase lengths, rhythms and rhyme schemes. For example, say there's a place in your verse where emotion gets pretty active or intense. You might try putting rhymes (both phrase-end and internal rhyme) close together, and try using short phrases.

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Approaches to Writing Song Lyrics

There can be many approaches for writing the lyrics to a song. The following are a few ways that it might be accomplished

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Melody First Approach

If you watched Peter Jackson's documentary on The Beatles during the creation of the album Let It Be, you would have seen several different methods the members used to create songs. One of the more impressive scenes is where Paul McCartney writes the song Get Back while noodling around on his bass. He gets the basis of the song with the harmony and melody within about fifteen minutes. The lyrics at that point were more or less a basis rhymically of what they'd become in the final version. In many interviews Paul would refer to this style of creating lyrics as Scrambled Eggs.

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Word Salad or Scrambled Eggs

The idea is to create a rhythm in your head and from that create a rhythm of lyric syllable placeholders perhaps with the rhyming suffix. The place holders can be whatever you think of. A good way to do it might be with using a common phrasing for rhythm like ta-DUM to show where the emphasis lies. This can be synchronized with a drum track's beats. According to Paul McCartney, many Beatles songs started out as word salad.

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What Comes First

The truth is that it doesn't matter how it is assembled so long as it sounds good in the end. There are lots of ways that a songwriter can write a song. Here are some different approaches that musicians have done:

Lyrics First	This might be described as how Elton John writes songs. Bernie Taupin would supply him with lyrics and Elton would write the harmony and melody for them.
Melody First	With this approach, the melody would need lyrics and harmony and rhythm.
Harmony First	In this approach the writer starts with a chord progression and writes the melody, lyrics and perhaps the rhythm.
Rhythm First	This might be the least used approach unless you're a drummer perhaps or a rapper. With this approach, the song starts out as a beat.

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