Things You'll Need:
- Pencil
- Paper
- Thesaurus
-
Step 1
Begin by writing down the story your song tells in narrative form. It doesn't have to rhyme or be poetic just yet - write the details down as you would read it in a newspaper or journal. For example, if my story is about getting dumped after taking a girl to a dance I could write this:
He went to the dance with a girl in a red dress. She was wearing red lipstick. They danced for 10 minutes. He went to the bathroom and when he came back she was leaving with another man. -
Step 2
Take your story and remove all articles, prepositions, pronouns and other words that don't convey information. Words like "a", "the", "for", "with" and even words like "I", "he" or "she" can be erased. Words that can be kept will be nouns and verbs. In our example, this leaves us with:
Dance girl red dress. Red lipstick. 10 minutes. bathroom leaving another man. -
Step 3
Use the thesaurus or your own imagination to look for opportunities to replace words with synonyms with the following conditions:
- Getting two words to rhyme
- Getting two words to have assonance (similar vowel sounds - for example "kite" and "mine"
- Getting two words to have consonance (similar consonant sounds - for example "cook" and "crack"
In our example I can replace "lipstick" with "kiss" - It gets across the same idea while having consonance with "dress". -
Step 4
Use the final list of words to start writing lyrics. You can add back in any necessary filler words such as "the", "a", "for", etc.
In this example I could write the first part of the song as:
Red dress,
With a red kiss,
We only danced 10 minutes.
