How To Write Songs

Category: writing

  • A Songwriter’s Main Struggle and How to Fix It

    Every songwriter has 2 main struggles: Struggle #1: To consistently make work you are proud of. Struggle #2: To have lots of people listen to and love your work. One of these is something we have immediate control over (hint, it’s #1!). Let’s look at the one we do have control over right now: consistently…

  • Top 5 Exercises for Coming Up With Great Song Lyric Ideas—#1: Sense Writing.

    In this series, I’ll go through my all-time Top 5 Exercises for generating lyric ideas, whether I’ve got a song idea going already or not.  These exercises don’t require inspiration. They mostly require 10 minutes and a pen. Just like anything in life, you can get better at writing great lyrics with practice. I hope…

  • My 6 Favourite Books of 2021

    Top 3 Fiction A Deadly Education, Naomi Novik I snuck this one in in the last week of 2021, and was overwhelmingly grateful to have the sequel, ‘The Last Graduate’ waiting next to my bed. I would have been devastated to have read something SO GOOD, and not be able to keep reading. What I…

  • George Saunders, Janis Ian, and Paul Simon—Where Meaning Comes From in Story

    In a recent newsletter by one of my favourite writers, George Saunders, he writes of one of his characters in a short story, The Falls: “A story has a surface dimension (let’s call it the overstory) and another, deeper, dimension (the understory). The overstory, in this case, is whether Morse will save the girls. That’s…

  • Drunk in the day – and other tips on writing well

    Writes William Zinsser in, “On Writing Well”: …you have to strip your writing down before you can build it back up. You must know what the essential tools are and what they were designed to do. Extending the metaphor of carpentry, it’s first necessary to be able to saw wood neatly to drive nails. Later…

  • The Best Method for Writing a Good Song

    From a recent interview with John Mayer: “Whenever I want to write a big song, I can’t. And by “big” I mean spatially…the glacially large space inside the heart, that’s when I get writers block…trying to write a song to fill the entire galaxy. But if I write a song about the size of a…

  • Why write it as a song?

    It’s a question I ask of myself all the time. Why write this idea as a song, and not as a poem? A short story? A blog post? An angry rant to a neighbour?  What function does a song serve that draws me to it as the vehicle for an idea? One answer is that…

  • 120 Sense Writing Prompts

    If you’re already familiar with Sense Writing (aka Object Writing), feel free to skip ahead to the prompts below. If Sense Writing is new to you, here’s a little primer. What is Sense Writing? Sense Writing is a timed 10-minute writing exercise, in which you take a prompt, and use that prompt as a gateway…

  • Songwriters on songwriting

    I’ve been baffled lately that there aren’t more songwriters in the world who write about writing. Luckily, there are centuries worth of novelists, essayists, and other author types who have written so lucidly and honestly about the craft of writing, its messiness, its need for discipline. (Some of my favourites are On Writing by Stephen…

  • Metaphor in songwriting is alive and well, thanks.

    Many years ago, while living in LA, I heard a Big Shot Industry Dude (cue Beethoven’s 5th…) say: “Songs shouldn’t have metaphors in them. I can’t think of a good song that has a metaphor.” To my great relief, and with a giddy sort of rebellious delight, all of us songwriters gathered afterward, as if…

  • Writing Tips from George Orwell

    One of the most incisive essays I have ever read on the art of writing is the short and stunning piece, ‘Politics and the English Language‘, written by George Orwell in 1947. Here, Orwell described a cliche as a ‘dying metaphor’. Orwell follows up with a succinct list of guides to follow: Never use a…

Weekend Songwriting Intensive - January 4-5

Ignite 2025 with an immersive weekend of songwriting, led by Keppie and Benny.