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| WORKSHOPS + Anatomy of a Song + The Art of Writing  + A Note on Workshops + Songwriting Exercises + Develop Your Songwriting Skills |
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Songwriting Skills and How to Develop Them
Cary Cooper "The only way to learn to write is to write." -Peggy Teeters "I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper." -Steve Martin (star and co-writer of "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid" "They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talk about writing or themselves." -Lillian Hellman Everyone has something to say! If you have the desire to say it in a song, the trick is figuring out how to say it in a way that sounds new and moves the listener. "Are we, who want to create, in some way specially talented people? Or has everybody else simply given up, either by pressures of modesty or laziness, and closed their ears from their inner need to create, until that need has died, forgotten and abandoned? When you look at children, you start to think the latter. I still haven't met a child who doesn't love - or who at least hasn't loved - drawing, writing or some other creative activity." -Natalia Laurila "The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say." -F. Scott Fitzgerald "The two most engaging powers of an author are, to make new things familiar, and familiar things new." -Samuel Johnson "Easy reading is damned hard writing." -Anonymous WHERE TO START: 1. Learn what you already know about basic song structure ( verse chorus bridge and all the variations of ) "Never let inexperience get in the way of ambition." -Terry Josephson 2. Listen listen listen to the music you like. * Go and hear songwriters you respect. Identify what it is about what they do that moves you and why. "Observe, don't imitate." -John M. Ford * Read lyrics like poetry. Study them. Pay attention to word choices. Pay attention to what grabs you and why. "Reading usually precedes writing and the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer." -Susan Sontag * Listen to melodies. Pay attention to melodies that speak to you. Invent melodies and hum them as you drive in the car or as you wash dishes. Play around with different notes and different ways of singing the same line. Observe what pleases your own ear. 3. Find or form a songwriting feedback group. Be open to feedback/constructive criticism from your peers. Find other songwriters you respect and bounce your songs off them. Give yourselves assignments to write. Try co-writing. "A writer judging his own work is like deceived husband he is frequently the last person to appreciate the true state of affairs." -Robert Traver "Listening to critics is like letting Muhammad Ali decide which astronaut goes to the moon." -Robert Duvall "Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself." -Harlan Ellison "I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite." -G. K. Chesterton 4. Write from your heart. Say things in a way that only YOU can say them, from YOUR unique voice. Don't worry about impressing anybody, or sounding like anybody else. Write the songs that no one can write BUT you. Write what you know. Start with what is close to your heart. The better you know or feel something, the more inspiration you have to draw on. "Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer." -Barbara Kingsolver "When you want to fool the world, tell the truth." -Otto von Bismarck "Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it." -Jesse Stuart "Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." -Cyril Connolly "My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly." -John D. MacDonald 5. Say things with pictures. Instead of saying, "I am hungry", describe what it is you want to eat. Make the listener see, smell, touch, and taste what you are singing about. Give them a movie to watch in their head while you sing. Think in terms of the most active verbs and the most vivid nouns. "You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." -Mark Twain "Put weather in." -Joseph Hansen 6. If you get stuck, ask yourself, what is the ONE THING I want the listener to know in this song, and write THAT. Identify your hook if there is one. Trust yourself. BANISH your inner critic during the writing process. "The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak." -Friederich Nietzsche "Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story." -F. Scott Fitzgerald "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." -Joan Didion 7. Write without an instrument. Write your lyrics first. and then start singing them. Once you can sing the melody the way you like it, then pick up an instrument and figure out the arrangement. Your melody will be stronger if you're not dependent on your instrument to write. 8. Edit edit edit! Learn what editing choices will make what you're trying to say even stronger. It's easy to get too attached to what you write, especially in the beginning. You feel so proud of what you've written, it's hard to imagine that it could possibly be better with a few minor changes. Once you've finished a song, step away from it for a couple of days and then go back to check for possible edits. "It is perfectly okay to write garbage - as long as you edit brilliantly." -C. J. Cherryh "He who stops being better stops being good." -Oliver Cromwell "For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word." -Catherine Drinker Bowen "I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again." -Oscar Wilde "My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: when you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip." -Elmore Leonard 9. Give yourself permission to write a really bad song. "If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative." -Woody Allen "The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas." -Linus Pauling "The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with." -William Faulkner "I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within." -Gustave Flaubert "My mother drew a distinction between achievement and success. She said that achievement is the knowledge that you have studied and worked hard and done the best that is in you. Success is being praised by others, and that's nice, too, but not as important or satisfying. Always aim for achievement and forget about success." -Helen Hayes 10. Have fun. Write what makes you happy. Write what clears out the cobwebs. Write to work out your anger. Write to heal your wounds. Write what you're too timid to say in your own voice. Write the fantasy version of your life. Write because you have to. Write because you know nothing else. Write write write write write! "Every word written is a victory against death." -Michel Butor "It's better to write about things you feel than about things you know about." -L. P. Hartley "The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything." -John Irving "Through joy and through sorrow, I wrote. Through hunger and through thirst, I wrote. Through good report and through ill report, I wrote. Through sunshine and through moonshine, I wrote. What I wrote it is unnecessary to say." -Edgar A. Poe "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" -E. M. Forster Tom Prasada-Rao's questions (to help you edit)
"It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end." -Ursula K. LeGuin The Journey One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice-- though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. "Mend my life!" each voice cried. But you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do-- determined to save the only life you could save. © Mary Oliver.
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