7 Tips For A Great Lyric Writing Process

If you are a songwriter, you’ve probably had this experience many times: staring at a blank page, not knowing what to write about, and not knowing where to start. It’s not that you don’t want to write anything, you just don’t have any inspiration. So how do we actually write lyrics without having any “natural” inspiration?

Writing good lyrics for a song is hands down one of the hardest aspects of the songwriting process. At least for me, it is, because I've had this problem myself so many times, and over the past few years I've learned a couple of tips and tricks to work my way around this problem. So here are 7 tips to write song lyrics without having any inspiration.

Tip #1: Your creativity needs to start flowing

There is this interview of Ed Sheeran on YouTube where he compares the songwriting process with dirty water that needs to come out of the tap first before the clear water can come out. This is kind of a brilliant comparison because it's the same with creativity, our terrible writing needs to start flowing first in order to let the good writing come out on the paper.

So one way how you can start up this creative momentum is by sitting down in front of a piece of paper and just start writing about anything. Set a timer for 10 minutes and just write about anything. This could be how you've spent your week so far, or how you're feeling right now, or you might want to write about a certain person.

For example: for me personally, I love to write about the dreams I’ve had that very night. They are often very weird and interesting stories that I wouldn't have come up with otherwise. Or I like to write about a certain place that I know very well from memory, and I try to describe it in detail.

Tip #2: Finding an interesting angle

So once you’ve written down something on a piece of paper, you are now more in a “writing” kind of mental state. It doesn't matter if it's just some mundane stuff like going to the grocery store or something. It can be anything basically.

When we start to write anything basically, we always do this with some sort of perspective on what we've written. Maybe it's a sad and emotional perspective. Maybe it's a political perspective. Or maybe you're always looking at things through a lens of humor.

The trick is to now turn it around and become aware of this perspective in what you've written down. Just detach yourself slightly from what you've just written down and think of it critically from another perspective. This way you can easily come up with a contrasting view in your song.

What’s the perspective you’re looking from?

photograph: 김-대정

For example: I tend to be very nostalgic about the past when I write, and recently I was writing in my notebook and I asked myself this critical question: was the past really all that good, or was it also maybe a little bit bad in some ways. Maybe the future will be better than I think, and maybe I should feel more nostalgic towards the future. It's not a fully fleshed out idea yet, but it's a nice foundation to build an idea on.

The trick is to eventually fall in love so to speak with a particular story, a certain character, a dream, or an idea. Once you've stumbled on the idea of your song, we can start to:

Tip #3: Plan the story of your song

Our average pop song is under 3 minutes, so we've got a very strict time frame where we can tell the listener what we are thinking and feeling. And most pop songs follow a similar song structure. So planning everything can help save you a lot of trouble and it gives you a cohesive lyric at the end.

An structure example of a simple pop song is of course: verse 1 - chorus - verse 2 - chorus - bridge - chorus. Choruses are often the same and they are lyrically supposed to give the listener the core idea in one or two simple phrases. The story is generally being told in the verses and in the bridge.

An example of what you can do is: in verse 1 we will sing about the initial thoughts we've written down in our short story through our first perspective. Then we get the chorus and come down to the 2nd verse, where we will write from the opposing perspective and keep the listener interested in our subject and story. Then in the bridge, you can draw your own conclusion from the two and give a final twist right before the last chorus so the lyrics remain interesting to listen to till the end.

Now that we've divided our main idea into little subcategories, we don't need to write an entire song, but we've just got to write these short little parts.

Tip #4: Which archetype story are you writing?

It took me quite some time to discover this, but this actually helped me quite a lot. Almost everything that you are experiencing and feeling in your life is not unique. It has probably been written down by other people in some shape or form. Let's just say you want to write about love: well there might've already been a couple of people that have written about that emotion.

So there are basically a couple of subjects or stories that you can write about that I'd like to call the "archetypes". But don't be discouraged. You should be happy! Now we've got a lot of examples we can learn from. This can help us in writing our own song about whatever story you'd like.

Tip #5: Don't be afraid to steal

There is this little book by Austin Kleon called Steal Like An Artist. And in the book, he argues that no art is ever 100% original. Everything has already been done before, and it is often an amalgamation of other art put together by the artist.

So what we've got to do now, is after we've pinned down our "archetype" subject in our lyric, we do some research online for art around this subject. This can be of course other songs, but it can also be literature, poetry, inspirational quotes online, Wikipedia pages, YouTube videos, etc. You're basically doing research on your subject and you're widening your own worldview on this subject.

When you're doing research you are once again stumbling on all sorts of other ways of looking at your subject than before. And slowly you are building some sort of world where your song is going to live in so to speak.

Tip #6: Capture your ideas

When you are going through all these steps you can all do it in your mind without writing any ideas down, but this is a great mistake. Ideas are rare and therefore you need to treat them like it and write down or record every little idea you have. Imagine this: ideas are like jellyfish floating around, and you are Spongebob, and you've got to capture them before they float away again.

When people are going through the creative process, three thought processes might occur in one’s mind when an idea comes floating by in the brain:

“The idea sucks so it's not even worth writing it down.”

Stop criticising yourself if you don't think your ideas are worthwhile. You’re only holding yourself back. Just write the initial idea down and let it sink in. You don't have to do anything with it.

“I'll remember the idea so I don't have to write it down.”

In that particular moment, everything seems like it will last forever, but I guarantee you: it won’t. You are just going to forget things if you don't capture them through writing, drawing, or recording.

“You're not even noticing that you are having an idea.”

This last one probably means that you are too distracted while writing. Turn off all your devices and just sit at the table with a piece of paper and a pen. The ideas will come if you wait long enough.

Tip #7: “Don’t lose sight of the bigger picture.”

“The Night Watch” is a giant painting by the famous Dutch painter Rembrandt. The canvas is huge (363 cm × 437 cm (11.91 ft × 14.34 ft) and in order to paint this masterpiece, the painter was forced to constantly step away from his work to see the bigger picture.

I wanted to use this as a metaphor for using breaks as our time of stepping away from our lyrics. When you take a break and do something completely else, like taking a shower, going for a walk, doing the dishes, your brain is still processing everything on a back-burner.

The craziest ideas or solutions to your songwriting problems will often come to you when you are doing something completely different. For me, this regularly happens when I’m physically moving, like walking or going to the gym. It’s as if getting my body into a flow is also getting my creativity to flow better.

Final thoughts:

And there you have it: 7 tips to write song lyrics without having any inspiration.

My personal experience is that the more you do it, the easier and the more often ideas will come to you. But as soon as you stop sitting at that paper every once in a while, the creativity seems to stop as well.

So that means you’ve got to get in the reps and write those stories, dreams, experiences even when you are not inspired. Starting a sentence can often kickstart the inspiration for a new one, and then you will write another one, and another one…

But don't make it too heavy for yourself. Just like lifting weights in the gym. If it's too heavy to do: make it lighter. So only write for 2 mins a day if it's all getting a bit too much for you.

And if it really doesn’t work anymore, take a break, and try again the next morning. At the end of the tunnel, if you have enough discipline and patience, there is going to be a song. I guarantee it.

7 Tips For A Great Lyric Writing Proces