A Songwriting Game to Improve Your Lyric Writing

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If you find lyrics hard to write, it may simply be a matter of working on it separately from your main songwriting sessions. There are some that love writing lyrics and nothing else, and so one option for those who find lyrics difficult is to collaborate.

But a great reason to develop and build your own lyric-writing skills is that your songs can say exactly what you want them to say, without the need to partner up with someone else.

So here’s a quick lyric-writing “game” that’s fun to do, one that should gradually enhance your ability to write meaningful lyrics.

1. On a sheet of paper in your songwriting note pad, write a general topic at the top. (“I’ve Met Someone New”, or “The Winter’s Been Too Long!”, or “Where Have All My Friends Gone?”… that sort of thing.)
2. Fill the sheet with words and phrases that relate to your topic. Don’t try to make connections at this point. Consider this to be almost like a word association game, where one word makes you think of another.
3. On a new page, create two columns. Label one “Verse” and the other “Chorus”.
4. Categorize your words. Go to your original sheet and look at each word one by one. Categorize them by determining whether they are words that are mainly descriptive in nature, or mainly emotional. Words that seem to describe situations in an observational sort of way should go in the “Verse” list, and those that express an emotion should go in the “Chorus” list.
5. Create random lines of verse lyrics. Look through your “Verse” list and try to create lines of lyrics. The purpose here is to write lines that are mainly observational, mainly describing situations, circumstances or people.
6. Create random lines of chorus lyrics. Now check your “Chorus” list and create lines of lyrics that express mainly emotional thoughts.

It is liberating to try an exercise like this without feeling the need to connect one line to the next. With this exercise you aren’t trying to write a song; you’re simply developing an ability to understand the difference between writing a line that’s destined to be a verse line, and one that’s intended to be a chorus line.

As an example, let’s say your topic is “The Winter’s Been Too Long!” Under “Verse”, you might have written “cold”, “snowy hills”, “icy-like fingers”, “freezing”, “hard as steel”, “brown”, “white”, “frozen…” This might lead you to write lines of verse lyrics such as:

• “The ground is frozen, hard as steel…”
• “Wind like ice across my face…”
• “Winter’s icy fingers refusing to let go…”

Under chorus, you might have written “help me”, “warm me up”, “will it ever stop?” “I feel the sun against my face”, “despair”, and so on. You might find yourself writing chorus lines like

• “Help me, help me, warm me up!”
• “Where’s the spring?”
• “I don’t mind snow, but will it ever stop?”

As you work, you’ll start to notice that some of your chorus lines will serve as answers to something that’s come up in your verse lines. Also, you’ll find that word lists have a way of homing in on a more specific topic. For example , you may have thought you were writing about the winter, when in fact the song has become a metaphor for your relationship with a loved one.

You’ll also find that once your true topic becomes clearer in this way, you’ll put your word lists aside and start all over again, with a more specific topic in mind. That’s the beauty of word lists. They focus your mind, make metaphors easier to identify and develop, and allow you to explore potent imagery.

Remember that whenever you write lyrics, keep words simple. Complexity in lyrics almost always come from the ways in which words are combined, not in the complex nature of the words themselves. Once you’ve included words in your lists like “attitudinal” and “soporifically”, you may have gone too far. 😉

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Written by Gary Ewer. Follow Gary on Twitter.