Writing better lyrics

What Hacker News says

1. runevaultJul 2021
   There are a lot of different drills, several of which are listed below but will touch on.

   1. Copy something you like. Take a sentence/paragraph/page/scene and just retype it in. This sounds crazy, but pushing the words not only into your brain but back out through your fingers gives your brain a different avenue into them.

   2. Object writing. Learned this one from Pat Pattison's writing better lyrics, but most of the techniques are generally applicable. You take an object/idea, and for 5-10 minutes write about it using all 6 senses (the standard five plus motion). The more you do this the more your writing will shift (at least in my experience).

   3. Journaling. Morning pages (3 pages at the very start of your day) is a common one for writers, learning to take the filter off and just write. A lot of crap might come out, and you'll just write about the day before or your concerns about the day ahead a lot, but the act of putting the words down will help you shift your writing.

   4. This one isn't a drill but I wanted to include it: explore other types of writing. If you are interested in academic writing, try making short stories or poems. Exploring entirely different uses of words will help you build new, because intent shapes the way the brain uses the words, and learning to unlock different pathways can have surprising results.

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2. runevaultJul 2021
   This is very true. Though there are also books to read that can help see things more deeply. A couple I really found helpful here are Elements of Eloquence (gets into rhetorical tools, parallel structure as mentioned in the article being one of many such examples), and Writing Better Lyrics which gives a lot of tools that helps for all forms of writing not only song lyrics.
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3. runevaultApr 2021
   I would agree with the music. Which is unfortunate because music doesn't tend to encompass all the different forms that poetry possesses, and both have their place. But, on some level, they both explore condensed use of metaphor/rhyme/etc to create powerful emotional effects in the audience, so they share a lot of similarities.

   For me, learning to write poetry and explore has been great, although funny enough one of the best books to help me with the writing of poetry was Writing Better Lyrics by Pattison, as his advice helps a great deal with poetry (with the above caveat about forms still holding true).

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4. runevaultFeb 2019
   So this is technically to language, but as someone who writes on top of codes it gave me so much to think about I feel it still counts. Writing Better Lyrics by Pat Pattison. The way he explores using senses, how to build metaphors, how to construct things gave me new ways to look at a lot of different things. I reread the book pretty regularly and glean something new every time.
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5. runevaultApr 2018
   On the Pattison one, out of curiosity did it use his Writing Better Lyrics for the material? I've read the book and love it to pieces even though I write prose, the way he explores words and phrases is sort of magical.
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6. hrnnnnnnNov 2015
   I'm doing this one right now, along with his book Writing Better Lyrics, it's great :)
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