My Exact Method for Writing Lyrics

I am not a good writer, far from it. Writing lyrics is a huge struggle for me. Am I going to let that stop me? Heck no. Over the years I’ve developed a method that helps me deliver lyrics from thin air, so to speak. See, lyrics rarely just magically jump out of your brain. You need to create the inspiration and use a workflow that allows you to get inspired. Without further a due, here’s my exact method for writing lyrics.

Keep a list of ideas

So what do I do? For the inspiration and song ideas, I keep a list. A list of cool sounding words and sentences. I write down ideas from books, movies, series and songs. For example, I was watching this one series from Netflix last week and one of the characters said something like: “I’m a lamp post that you’re passing by.” It spoke to me, so I wrote it down. It immediately gave me an inspiration. I mean, come on, what a wonderful and different way of saying “you’re not paying attention to me”.

Another example would be a book I read. It was about why one should delete all social media accounts. There were a few lines that I wrote down instantly as I read them: “Mass produced fraud intentented to manipulate”, “A global game that most of us are losing every time” and “Short term dopamine shots drives our systems”. I partly agree with what the writer was talking about, and I liked the dramatic and powerful feel of the lines.

Decide what the song’s about

See what I mean? I gather ideas everywhere I can. I don’t use them straight away, but I have a long list of ideas whenever I want to start working on some lyrics. When the process of  writing the lyrics actually begins, the first thing that I do is figure out the theme –  what the song is about. Because of my list I have a lot of material to choose from.

Gather content

When I have the main idea figured out, I start to brainstorm content around that central theme. I might already have a lot of ideas from a similar topic listed. To go back to the earlier example, I knew I wanted to write about the problems with social media today. I began to craft that idea forward by Googling quotes about social media. I like to use Google images, because it gives me visual pictures of the quotes and I can narrow down to more specific search parameters easily. You could also use different services, such as Pinterest.

I found quotes such as “Social media has created jealous behaviour over illusions” and “Stop comparing your behind-the-scenes to someone’s highlight reel”. Those two are right on the money and I totally share the ideology behind them. As you probably already noticed, I’m not a fan of social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram, not at all. I think they have more negative than positive sides, but that’s a discussion for another time.

In my mind the song already started to take a shape. I wanted to point out how social media makes us compare our everyday lives to something that’s not real. The youth are born and raised to do it, which is really sad and twisted. I also wanted to highlight the fact that we have the technology to communicate all the time, yet we’re further apart than ever before. Suddenly I had this massive inspiration and the whole song was finished in two or three hours. 

When I knew what I was after, and the idea was crystal clear in my head, it was so fast to write it down. I put together as much quotes and other material as I could find in 30 minutes. When that was done, I started to tweak the quotes and sentences to form my own lines according to my vision. I tried to say things a little differently, instead of saying exactly what the quotes were stating. A metaphor or a twist of  some sort will surely fresh things up. I did that by narrowing down my Google image search to look for quotes (and inspiration) about specific lines. I also hunted down synonyms for certain words. I didn’t worry about the order of the lines just yet.

Plan the song

The next step for me was to plan the song. I decided what I wanted to say in different parts. I wanted the chorus to point out the fact that we are further apart than ever and try to give the impression that we’re doing better than we actually are, because those are things that people can really identify with. They steer up emotions. That message also clearly delivers the point of my song. In verses I wanted to let the listener know that I’m speaking of the problems of social media, but I didn’t want to make it too obvious. Pre-Chorus is the transit between them lyrically and musically. The bridge was left for an entirely different point of view.

Write the song

At that point I knew what I wanted to say in each and every part of the song and I had a lot of lines lined up and ready to go. From now on out it was just putting pieces together and filling out the blanks. Sure, there was still much to do in terms of rhyming and figuring out what lines would work together, but it goes surprisingly smoothly when the heavy lifting has already been done. I use a service called RhymeBrain to help me with rhyming. It’s really handy if you need to find a rhyming pair for a word. RhymeZone is another great service, and like RhymeBrain, it’s free to use. Just Google them up. 

This is my favourite part of the whole process, because I’m able to make artistic choices without getting stuck. It’s exciting and inspiring to see how the song starts to come together. You’ll find the lyrics in the end of this post, so you can check out what I came up with.

That’s the whole process in a nutshell. Let’s revise:

• Keep a list of ideas
• Decide what the song’s about
• Gather content around the idea you’ve chosen
• Plan the song
• Put the pieces together and write the song
  

For me it’s always been easier to have a melody or an idea of a melody before lyrics. It’s because I can sing or hum the lyrics in my head while trying to match them with a melody. The problem with writing lyrics beforehand, for me at least, is that I’ve had to fix and change the lyrics afterwards anyway, if a melody isn’t a perfect match. Be as it may, you can follow along with my method or just take the parts that work for you. Hopefully you gained some new ways to write lyrics and / or got inspired.

Here are my downloadable information packed PDF-guides to help you further with songwriting:

5 Steps to Create Music Faster  (..and avoid the writer’s block!)

6 Step Guide to Realistic Midi Drums

Check out also: “How to Have More Time for Making Music?”

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As promised, here are the lyrics. They’re from my song called The Blue Light.