7 Tips To Overcome The Lyric Writing Block
// November 23rd, 2009 // Songwriting
What I like to do, if I get stuck during the lyrics process, is to focus on the subject of my song and the structure of the verse or chorus. Especially if you’ve already written a cool and catchy verse, what you can do on the second one, is to build upon what you’ve already written. Some methods:
- Additive: Adding more “information” by adding more of sounding-alike stuff, like variations of a theme. For example, if your first verse begins like this: “Does it make you sad”, the second can begin “Does it feel so bad” and then you can work from there, expanding your story. Variations of words and phrases are also a good idea (like “everything/every dream”, “places I’ve been/faces I’ve seen” etc. Lyric writing is after all a word-game process!
- Subtractive: A more challenging and also unusual technique is to remove words by either: a) using words that end a phrase and begin the next one, like in the chorus of Alice Cooper’s “Hell is living without you”: “Hell is living without your [love] ain’t nothin’ without your [touch] me heaven would be like [hell] is living without you”. Or: b) remove all verbs or everything but the verbs, the beginning or the ending of a phrase. For example: “Sometimes I feel like I’m the only living, breathing, thinking, feeling human being” can become: “Sometimes the only living, breathing, thinking, feeling human being”, and even: “Sometimes I feel like I’m the only” or “feeling human being”.
- Use of opposites: Make your next verse a complete opposite from the previous one. Either: a) change it’s atmosphere. If the previous was sad, make this one happy etc, or: b) change the placement of the words. For example: “I touched the hidden treasures underneath a riven earth” could become “I touched the riven treasures underneath a hidden earth”. Or even change the words “touched” and “underneath” to something even more appropriate to the newly created phrase, with a realisting or – better yet – surrealistic approach.
- Focus on rhyming: Try to catalog (in your mind or even in writing) as many rhyming words as you can think of at the time. Then choose the most appropriate for your song’s subject and build your phrases upon them.
- Forget about rhyming: Depending on the style and of course the mood of the song you can keep it without any rhyming at all, but with a steady rhythm, or even with a more free use of words, almost like prose. Just tell the story.
- Use your obsessions: Every songwriter has his/her obsessions about something. What are yours? You can create your own “vocabulary” of pictures, stories, atmospheres, even sounds by utilising your obsessions to their maximum potential.
- Make it unusual: You’ve chosen a great word on your first phrase but the only words rhyming with it create very unusual pictures? That’s great, you can use it in your advantage! Build your next phrase on that word and emphasize the surreal atmosphere it creates, it can bring more depth and emotion to your lyrics by creating climax and antithesis.
These are only a few out of many tools you can use to overcome your lyric writing block. You can use some of the above or all of them in a single song. Let me know if they’ve been of any help to you. Now go write some lyrics!
