Writing With No Words

Writing about things like love, apologizing or saying how much you admire someone without sounding like you are sucking up to them are tough enough subjects. Making these into songs can be even tougher. Here are a few ideas for those times when words just aren't showing up.

LOVE

Sure, there are some fun songs out there where the hero or heroine just can't seem to get the right words said to their object of affection. Try to put yourself in that situation, and remember just how flustered you felt-the taste in your mouth, the nausea, lack of breath or too much, the faint scent of your own sweat or the flush in your cheeks and/or ears, and so forth. Describe these, or try to "say" them musically with bass or drum beats for your heart thumps, the swirling hypnotic dizzying music that sounds like you felt just before you realized you'd locked your knees and were about to pass out, and so forth. Be a little silly, and go out on a limb here-try to avoid the usual cliché phrases, and dare to be poetic if you can, or just plainspoken for now, and worry about it rhyming later-that is what editing is for, anyway.

I'M SORRY

Swallowing one's pride can taste really awful-even worse than love can. The heat in your face, the stitch in your side when your heartburn kicks in, the clamping in your throat as you try not to cry, the deep breaths you take to regain your composure, the pressure behind your eyes as your anger rises that you will have to apologize to someone knowing full well that you did something really stupid, but just don't want to own up to it-all of this makes for great lyric writing. Get those senses going, here, and work yourself up to really clearly remembering just how it felt the last time you had to do this, and try to show how it felt, not just say the words. Letting your audience know just how much it took out of you to admit to the wrong can really let your main character get a lot of sympathy from the listeners, since they have all probably been there at some point, and have probably felt exactly the same, so don't worry about getting too detailed-you really can't. Let them KNOW how sorry you are, and how much you feel healed by saying that, too. Even if you are writing a song about apologizing when you know the character really doesn't mean it, too, describe that in full tidbits, too, so the audience can see just what a cheat and a creep the person is-getting them to dislike your characters is still emotion, and something that can get people to remember your lyric, so paint this person awful if that is your intent, and paint them up worse than black.

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