Songwriting: From Prose to Poetry

We know we can “write words”, but that “writing lyrics” is going to take something more. Let’s extend our existing ability to string words together in a more poetic direction.

We’ve already identified a few ways that poetry or lyrics are different from everyday writing or prose. Let’s go through them and see how we can start to make our writing more poetic. We’ll go through them one-by-one, but naturally in practice they all work together.

Remember to bring your Heart and Hearing into play as you go through the exercises, paying attention to your own taste and what you hear, not just intellectually following the steps and thinking in terms of “right” and “wrong” (Head).

Internal Form

In writing prose, we structure our words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and perhaps paragraphs into headed sections. We are strict about the rules of punctuation and grammar. In poetry we structure our words into lines, lines into stanzas, and we are much more relaxed and flexible about grammar, bending rules where it suits our creative intentions.

With lyrics, we can think of each stanza as corresponding to a section of the Form, and so “Internal Form” means the structure or pattern of lines within a stanza of the lyrics. For example, you could annotate the two stanzas of “Chatter with the Angels” from the Starter Songs in Chapter 9: Solfa like this:

Chatter With The Angels: internal form example

The choice of where each line starts and ends is part of our creative expression, informed by rhythm, rhyme, and the phrasing of the melody it will be set to.

For example, the Starter Song “Frosty Weather” has four measures, but the intended phrasing of the lyrics means we would write it as two short lines and one longer line, like this:

Frosty Weather lyrics example

Let’s repeat the earlier exercise “Labelling Form Within A Section” but pay closer attention to the structure of the lyrics.

EXERCISE: Analysing Internal Form

Select a section of a song you’re familiar with (i.e. something with lyrics)
Listen through just that section. Write down the lyrics.
Now annotate the structure of the lyrics using letter names, based on the “repetition vs. change” principle. For example, a verse may feature different lyrics for every line but the same melody three times before a variation for the fourth line. You could write this as “A A A B”. Or a chorus may consist of the same lyrics repeated four times, but with two different melodies alternating. You could write this as “A B A B”. If there is a slight variation rather than something completely different you can use an apostrophe after the same letter name e.g. A’ for a small variation on the A phrase.
What do you notice about the way you naturally wrote down the lyrics, and the structure you’ve identified? Did you automatically put the lyrics of each phrase on their own line? Can you see any other ways to write the lyrics which would make sense (e.g. splitting the lines in two, or joining some together)?

One thing you may quickly notice is that although there are many similarities between song lyrics and poetry, lyric writers tend to be far more flexible with line lengths! While poems typically have a consistent pattern of matching line lengths in their internal form, song lyrics often vary far more. The underlying music provides a different kind of regular structure which allows for this freedom, without the listener feeling things are jumbled or disjointed, the way they might with poetry whose lines varied so much. Keep this in mind as we continue and look in more detail at the rhythmic patterns of the words in lyrics.

Rhythm

When we read prose, we decide for ourselves the pacing of words, and what pauses to add between words, sentences and paragraphs. With poetry there is normally much less leeway: it is written with the intention of being read in a certain rhythmic pattern. With lyrics, this leeway is reduced even further, and while a musician might well choose to bend that , the lyrics are written to correspond to the melody with quite clearly-defined timing of each syllable of each word.

In poetry there’s a tradition of analysing the rhythm as a pattern of long and short syllables. For example the iambic pentameter favoured by Shakespeare has each line as a pattern of five Short-Long syllable pairs: “dah-DUM, dah-DUM, dah-DUM, dah-DUM, dah-DUM”, so that “Two households, both alike in dignity” was written to naturally have the rhythm “two HOUSE-holds BOTH a-LIKE in DIG-ni-TY”.

In lyrics, you can take that same approach. But if you’ve been through the Part II chapters on The Beat and Rhythm, you’ll be equipped with a much more versatile tool: our Rhythm Syllable building blocks! For example, the pattern above could be expressed as ka-Tim ka-Tim ka-Tim ka-Tim ka-Tim.

Let’s start to explore the Rhythm of lyrics.

EXERCISE: Hearing the Rhythm in Lyrics

Select a stanza of lyrics (e.g. the verse or chorus to your favourite song) and write them out.
Speak them aloud, as if you’d never heard the song and were handed the lyrics as a poem.
Mark the syllables you naturally emphasised, whether by duration (short versus long) or which you would naturally stress (e.g. one would naturally say “TEApot” rather than “teaPOT”). Also mark where you naturally paused between phrases or lines. It may take multiple repeats of lines or the whole stanza to figure this out!
Write out a fresh copy of the lyrics.
Now either sing the lyrics, or audiate the song and speak the lyrics with their sung rhythm.
Mark the emphasis and pauses which occurred this time.
Compare the two. What do you notice about how the natural spoken rhythms correspond—or don’t—to the sung rhythms?
If you’re familiar with rhythm syllables, you might like to try transcribing the rhythm of the sung lyrics using Rhythm Syllables and/or Stick Notation.

Once you’ve tried this kind of analysis once or twice, let’s experiment creatively:

EXERCISE: Writing Lyrics for a Rhythm

Compose a short rhythmic pattern. This can simply be a sequence of “short vs. long”or “stressed vs. unstressed” like the traditional approach in poetry, or if you’re familiar with Rhythm Syllables, write a pattern of your choosing in syllables and/or Stick Notation.
Now come up with words which fit that pattern—as nonsensical as you like!
Optional: Try to write something which makes some sense as a line of lyrics, or extend to a full stanza of multiple lines following the same rhythmic pattern.

Exploring the rhythm of lyrics like this is valuable both for how cohesive and elegant it can help our lyrics to be, and as a bridge towards setting the lyrics to a melody. As we saw in the first exercise above, the words alone can indicate a suitable rhythm, which you can then use as-is, or as the basis for composing your melody’s rhythm. Or vice-versa, if you’ve got a melodic idea with its own rhythm, you now have a way to help you better find words which fit.

Rhyme

Sticking with our Shakespearean theme, we might well ponder: “To rhyme, or not to rhyme? That is the question.”

In poetry there are great works which rhyme, great works which don’t, and even some which mix the two. In lyrics, it’s very rare to make no use of rhyme at all, and in most genres there’s a convention that each stanza will have a structure of how its lines rhyme (called a rhyme scheme).

This gives a satisfying hint to the listener about the internal form, rather than it sounding like a series of unrelated lines. It makes the song feel more cohesive, and also contributes a form of tension and release, where we as listeners are anticipating the rhyming word to close the “open loop” that’s been set up.

The most common and basic is that each pair of lines will rhyme, for example in the hymn “Be thou my vision”:

Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart,

be all else but naught to me, save that thou art;

be thou my best thought in the day and the night,

both waking and sleeping, thy presence my light.

Another very common four-line scheme is ABCB, for example in The Mountain Goats’ “This Year”:

I broke free on a Saturday morning.

I put the pedal to the floor.

Headed north on Mills Avenue,

and listened to the engine roar.

More complex rhyme schemes are also possible, for example in Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky”, after four stanzas with ABAB rhyme scheme (i.e. lines one and three rhyme, lines two and four rhyme), we find:

One, two! One, two! And through and through

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with its head

He went galumphing back.

We can see the second and fourth lines rhyme (“snack” and “back”) but the first and third don’t—an ABCB rhyme scheme. But there is also internal rhyme in the first line (“two”, “two”, and “through”).

Rhyme is certainly a matter of taste, and as always in music, bending or breaking the “rules” produces an unexpected twist which keeps listener’s attention and helps make the music compelling.

There’s also a middle ground: the near-rhyme or slant-rhyme, where the words have a similar sound but don’t technically rhyme.

Typically this means having the same vowel sound but a different final consonant, for example “This little piggy stayed home” being paired with “This little piggy had none”.

It can also be a similar vowel and the same or similar final consonant, for example Taylor Swift’s “‘Cause baby now we got bad blood. / You know it used to be mad love.” This can satisfy the listener’s ear and demonstrate the internal form in the same way a true rhyme can, while allowing more creative freedom for the writer to choose just the right word.

To start tuning our Head and Hearing in to the world of rhyme, let’s keep it simple and just look for possible rhymes without worrying yet about writing a whole line or whether the meaning of the word is relevant.

EXERCISE: Find Rhyming Words

Constraint: find many possible rhymes for one particular word.

Select a word. This could be the final word of a line from your favourite song or a line you’ve written, or you could pick a word completely at random from a page of prose (like this one!). Example: “twist”, from the section above.
Brainstorm as many words as you can which rhyme with that word. You might like to set a timer and try a free-writing approach. It will probably be easy to think of some one-syllable words, but look for some longer words which still rhyme too. You can also explore near-rhymes. Example with “twist”as prompt: list, gist, mist, grist… sexist, facist, nihilist… furthest, blessed, bird’s nest.
Select another word and repeat!

Now let’s try a more practical application of our rhyming imagination, by writing our own second line for a rhyming couplet: two lines whose final words rhyme with each other.

EXERCISE: Write Your Own Rhyming Couplet Responses

Select a line to be the first line of your couplet. This can be from a song you like, something you’ve written yourself, or one of the Starter Songs from [Chapter Nine Solfa][Chapter Nine]. Example: “Mary had a little lamb”
Write a line which rhymes and makes some sense following the first. Aim to have it be the same length, as measured in number of syllables or (jumping ahead a little to the Melody section below) the same number of beats. Examples:
“This sheep was from Amsterdam.”
“Lamb was happy as a clam.”
“It got her out of many a jam.”

TIP: These often-silly rhyme exercises are great ones to treat as a game and play with a friend, as mentioned earlier in the chapter!

Emotion

The best music elicits an emotional response in the listener. Not just emotions like “happy” or “sad”, but including humour (think Weird Al Yankovic, Adam Sandler, or They Might Be Giants) or the uplifting urge to dance (think electronic dance music at a rave). This can be driven by the music alone, but with a song there is also great power in the lyrics to convey and provoke emotions.

As a songwriter you can either first get clear on the emotion you want to capture, express, and evoke, or you can simply stay mindful of the emotions which arise as you explore writing lyrics. Either way, as noted in the previous section on Emotion and Ideas, having a clear, intentional, cohesive concept of the emotional content of your song will make a huge difference to the effectiveness of your songs.

In particular, we want to pay attention to emotion because it’s a huge part of how we can take the listener on a journey through the course of a song. The song’s Form and musical content can do this too, as is the case with purely-instrumental music—but again, songs have the added power of lyrics to shape and guide the listener’s inner experience as they listen.

In the earlier exercise “Analyse Ideas and Emotions” we wrote down a description of the emotions evoked in a song, and optionally for each section of the song. Now let’s take that a step further.

EXERCISE: Emotion Map

Select a song, and write down (or look up) its lyrics.
Thinking just about the lyrics, write down the emotions conveyed in each section.
Now sketch out the emotional journey of the song. You might like to draw something like a Pitch Contour (see [Chapter Eight Relative Pitch][Chapter Eight]) showing emotions rising and falling, or a “mindmap” type diagram of how one emotion develops into another from section to section. If you can, try to write a short description of the emotional journey, for example “The first verse begins in a state of heartbroken despair, which is then amplified in the chorus. The second verse looks back to happier times with cheerfulness and a sense of nostalgia, which then contrasts with the chorus returning to heartbreak and sorrow. The final verse hints at acceptance and a new seed of hopefulness for the future.”

As always, be on the lookout for potential diamonds! After doing this exercise a few times, choose the “emotion map” you liked best, and use it as a creative prompt:

EXERCISE: Write Lyrics for an Emotion Map

Constraint: Use a given emotion map and write your own lyrics to match.

Using one of the emotion maps you’ve come up with, or the example above, try writing your own lyrics which convey that same emotional journey.

If this seems like too much of a “blank sheet” to you right now you can:

Use the free-writing technique introduced earlier (i.e. set a timer and just braindump whatever comes out, as a first draft—or use free-writing to brainstorm the ideas which will be ingredients, such as characters, scenes, experiences).
Add further Constraints, for example follow a particular rhyme scheme, using as few words as possible, or even using only one-syllable words! Remember our goal isn’t to produce Grammy-worthy lyrics, but to exercise our lyric-writing muscles.

Almut Says… This illustrates how you don’t need to have the emotion you are writing about, to be able to write about it. You can write in any mood and don’t have to wait for a particular emotion to be present in yourself. Instead, you can set an intention and then see yourself as a spectator of this emotion, expressing it as clearly as you can. Sometimes it is even better to not be in a difficult emotional state when writing, but to be able to reflect about the feelings. We draw on our experiences with emotions. This way, we can even imagine emotions others might have (e.g. characters in a song) and write about them without having been in the exact same situation. Writing does not have to be autobiographical; the important thing is conveying the emotion of the experience.

Imagery

One thing which sets poetry apart from prose is its use of imagery. This can be using more romantic, evocative vocabulary, it can be literally describing visuals, it can be using analogy or metaphor instead of literal statements. The degree to which songwriters use these techniques varies. Some prefer simple, straight-forward language, and others far more abstract lyrics which only hint at the underlying story.

Whatever your personal style might turn out to be, we want to stimulate the listener into creating a “mind movie” as they listen. That might mean imagining the characters and events of your song, or recalling their own experiences which are brought to mind by your words and the emotions evoked.

You can probably think of songs which have that kind of clear visual scene associated in your memory. It’s amazing how vivid those mental movies can be, inspired by a purely non-visual artform!

EXERCISE: Increase the Imagery

Select a short piece of prose, for example a news article, diary entry, or part of a work of fiction (like a short story or a novel).
Distil out the story as a short bullet-point list of the events which occurred. One example bullet point could be “He bought a book.”
Try writing your own version, making use of one or more of the following techniques:
- ⁃ Sensory writing: think about sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch, and include lines which conjure up the experience for one or more of those senses. Our example above might become: “He could smell the years in the pages.”
- Romantic writing: replace literal, factual words and phrases with more imaginative, evocative, poetic alternatives. Example: “Finally he found his saviour, bound in black and white.”
- Analogy and Metaphor: Instead of saying what literally happened, use an analogy (e.g. “Its pages shone like a lighthouse in the darkest night.”) or metaphor (“From the Everest of irrelevance he drew his prize.”).
- Big theme: Identify and communicate the central theme of the story. This is often a good fit for the chorus, but can also be woven throughout. Think in terms of “ideas and emotions”, as covered earlier (e.g. “He held relief and salvation in his hands.”)
- Zoom In/Out: Instead of simply telling the story as a sequence of events, you can “zoom in” (going into greater detail on one moment or experience) or “zoom out” (communicating the bigger-picture story these events were part of).
- Point of View: Prose is typically written from a single, consistent point of view. For example, an external narrator, the protagonist or hero, or an observer who’s also part of the story. With more poetic lyric-writing we have the opportunity to change the point of view, even verse-by-verse. Is there part of the story that would be well served by switching from first person (“I did …”) to third person (“They did…”) or from one person’s perspective to another’s?
Once you’ve explored the possibilities of each of the techniques above, try writing a version of the lyrics which uses whichever you feel fit best, according to your own taste.

Bringing It All Together

We’ve covered several ways you can extend your existing prose-writing skills to more poetic writing, better suited to writing lyrics. Now let’s have fun bringing it all together.

EXERCISE: Write New Lyrics For An Existing Melody

Constraint: Use a given form and internal form. Optionally also use the same rhyme/rhythms and emotions/ideas.

Select a song you know well.
Using all the techniques covered so far, write your own lyrics for the same melody. Keep the same form, and the same inner form (line length in syllables or beats, and number of lines). You may find it easier (or harder!) to also keep the same rhyme scheme and rhythm, and/or the same ideas and emotions. To help avoid perfectionism, you may like to set a timer, and see how far you can get in, say, 10 minutes.

Now let’s remove those Constraints and try writing a set of lyrics from scratch.

Starting with a blank sheet of paper can be scary! The sequence below should be helpful for you, but remember also that you need not share what you write with anybody just yet, and that setting a timer can help you accept that it’s not going to be finished or perfect.

EXERCISE: Write Lyrics For A Song

Select ideas and emotions for your lyrics.
Use the free-writing technique to brainstorm possibilities based on those ideas and emotions. You may find words, phrases or full lines emerging, as well as a sense of the overall story and emotional journey you wish to capture and convey.
Decide on the form to use (knowing that you are free to change it along the way)
Use the free-writing technique to draft some lyrics
Pin down a rhyme scheme (if any) and the rhythm (which can be just the line length in number of syllables or beats, or a specific pattern of short/long or weak/stressed syllables). Refine your lyrics to match. Free write again if needed.
Speak (or even sing) your lyrics. Pay attention to your Hearing and Heart response, and refine further.
If you feel stuck or blocked at any point, turn your attention to another section or aspect of the lyrics, or use free-writing or additional Constraints to help get your creativity flowing.

After going through this process, you might well produce something you’re pleasantly surprised by! It may not feel “finished” or “good enough” yet, and that’s fine. You can return to it later, or treat it as purely practice. Are there any potential diamonds you can spot—words, phrases, lines, ideas which stand out as worth hanging onto for future writing? Could you see your creativity and skills increasing with the practice?

If you’ve read Chapter 6: Superlearning, also keep in mind the “Power of Not Finishing”: often if we move on, our brain will continue churning away in the background. So rather than strain away trying to “solve” the problem, release your grip. Later on, perhaps in the shower or while washing the dishes, suddenly things may well click into place.