kalowe asked me this question and i thought i'd put it to all BotBrs! i'm always interested in learning about others' creative processes (cf. XHB vlogs), but i've had the thought that writing seems like a bit more of a black box operation compared to musical composition, in that people seem to be a bit more protective of their own 'formula' and there's far less advice going around out there that i'd consider to be actually useful.

for my part, being asked this question prompted the realisation that my own process feels like a bit of a black box even to myself. i can't really think of any way to formalise how i personally do it, but there are definitely rules that i have found, through tests and agonies, to work for me. hopefully you will find them helpful, but bear in mind that i still break them all the time, and other BotBrs might join this thread to give you the exact opposite advice. it's a confusing world out there.

kalowe specifically asked for this, but to everyone else - if you don't like the stuff i make, you should probably ignore all that follows.

with that said, here are my tips:

always submit, even if it's shit
like a lot of the rules that will follow, this one applies to more than just writing, but it's still worth mentioning. bad ideas, if not released, stick around and gum up your system, blocking new, good ideas from forming. you gotta crank the gunk out even if it stinks.

have a theme
a theme can be something as cliche as "love," "war," or "revenge," or it can be something more obscure or kind of vague. either way, having some overarching idea you're interested in will help direct your thoughts.

i find that when i have a theme on my mind, i can't help but make everything i write about it. i will write several songs trying to attack the idea from different angles, and out of a handful i'll end up happy with maybe one or two (cf. always submit, etc.). the more you write about a theme, the better you'll get at transforming the idea into scenes and sensations.

write what you see
i get a lot of mileage out of picturing some bizarre scene that matches the mood i'm going for and just describing in literal terms what i'm seeing in my minds eye*. if you have a theme in mind (cf. have a theme) you might find that certain details seem to naturally jump out at you. listen to your instincts there! you can create strange, original metaphors this way and it will feel like it's happening by accident.

*in fact this applies to every sense, not just sight.

trust your audience
some people, maybe most people, won't know exactly what you're going for, and that's ok. it's so tempting to add little explanatory details to make sure the listener really gets it, but this usually results in the thing ending up feeling overwritten and clunky. you've just got to have faith that someone will get it. hell, sometimes voters in an XHB will interpret something i made in a completely novel way, and that's just as rewarding as when someone gets it the way i wanted them to get it.

stress and release
i personally find that writing, like music, is usually an exercise in building and relieving tension. that doesn't always mean that you have to end by answering every question, though - sometimes you might want to leave the listener in a state of uncertainty, just like sometimes you might want to end a piece of music on an unresolved chord.

everything is about sex
cf. stress and release.

write out of order
if you have a great image or turn of phrase that you've latched on to just get it down before it flutters away. i will often start with a cathartic idea i want to end a song with (cf. stress and release) and work backwards from there. this will help trigger new ideas, which you can then order as appropriate.

meta moment: i started this post with just four or five points in mind, but writing it has stirred up so many - i only thought of this one moments before hitting "save new thread", and now i'm inserting it in where i think it would make the most sense from a reader's perspective.

cliches are cliche for a reason
cliches, or "tropes" (i kind of hate this word), endure because they capture something important about human life. even if you want to subvert a "trope" you should still try to understand what people find appealing about it, otherwise your attempt at subversion will fail.

if you do understand why a cliche is effective, you will be able to transform it and make it your own. then it will no longer seem like a cliche at all. many of the great songwriters know just how to deliver the old cliches with exactly the right spin that they hit you from a new direction and feel completely original.

read a lot
when i don't read a lot (specifically, novels) i end up recycling the same ideas, the same phrasings, and the same images over and over again. reading helps flush out your memory and give your mind new toys to play with, and new ideas (or new ways of approaching old ideas) will naturally follow.

learn songs by heart
i find that once i learn to play a song myself (i.e. singing while playing - usually guitar) it ends up worming its way into my subconscious far more deeply than if i'd listened to it even hundreds of times. i must add that this can be a curse as well as a blessing - i've probably unintentionally plagiarised details from numerous songs i've learned while writing for BotB. that's ok though, all my heroes stole from their heroes.

don't use a rhyming dictionary
i'm including this because i have succumbed to the temptation to do it before and the results have universally been hacky drivel. there's no substitute for exercising your own vocabulary muscle the hard way. if you really can't think of one, better to just skip a rhyme without explanation.

don't use LLMs*
...at any stage of your creative process, even the editing stage. all it will do is dilute whatever was unique about art made by you, specifically, and drag it closer to the mathematical average of all human-written text. you may like the result, but it won't be your work.

*Large Language Models, i.e. text-based AI such as the (in)famous ChatGPT

* * *

hope you found this helpful, kalowe! i started out idly musing on your question as i walked home from work, then i sat down at the computer and all these words fell out just like that. thank you for prompting this, i really enjoyed writing it.

now it's time to hear from other BotBrs!

thats simple

i don't

well, why not start today? get some practice in - singer-songwriter could be on its way!

must say first of all that i definitely agree with what you wrote under "always submit, even if it's shit", "write out of order", "read a lot" and "trust your audience" - some of that i think applies just as well to the other aspects of writing music. such as "listen a lot": my first advice to anyone who feels like they're stagnating musically.

oh, and re: "don't use a rhyming dictionary", totally! i have fallen victim to this before by the logic of "ah what if i'm forgetting a really good word i could use here..." and i have traditionally come out the other end of the rhyming dictionary with some of the most hamfisted lyrics imaginable - stuff i look back at and go "hm yeah if i ever rework this song, those lyrics are definitely getting replaced". it's not worth it!!!

thinking about how to answer the question of this topic for myself... i'm still relatively new to lyric writing in the grand scheme. maybe i'm starting to hit "intermediate" instead of "beginner" by now lol, but vocals are not a super common thing for me. i've been consciously trying to practice vocals and lyric writing the last couple years though, i want to do more and it's been fruitful to explore.

i think for me there needs to be an initial idea seed and things just blossom outward from there. usually the idea seed is like, 1-2 lines or a phrase that feels powerful. something that's "good" (heavy quotes) enough for me to want to structure a song around it, to justify its existence or whatever.

it's harder for me to come at it from just a thematic point of view; for some reason it's more difficult to choose a focus, or harder to navigate to one. sometimes i get lucky though - maybe that means i just need to practice more since i usually only sit down to write lyrics when i'm feeling specifically inspired to.

as an example, for "home for the holidays" from last year's Advent Calendar, i woke up, read the prompt and, still lying in bed, thought about it for a moment going "man, Christmas ghosts huh... this is not my kind of theme, i have no idea what to do for this." and then i landed on the initial line, "thought i saw a ghost / but it was just you in the mirror", and i was like, wait - yeah - that's the song. and it was. that just informed every other thing i wrote in the song, the concept was there and i had to follow through. usually it's the other way around, but that's where the good stuff happens at any rate.

something i've started enjoying lately is writing less strictly in terms of form. i did a bunch of chiptune pop type tunes where i was very deliberate about making the layouts of verses and choruses match and do some kind of rhyme scheme and all that. but it's been fun to just explore using fewer individual lyrics and repeating parts more, or to care less about rhymes and fleshing out the form. kind of freeing sometimes to just write this smaller thing and not have to worry about making other parts to match it.

i think what i like the most about writing lyrics is borrowing from reality to produce fiction. (actually i think this might be writing in general for me!) i seldom write purely autobiographically, but there are bits of myself, my feelings and the world around me in my lyrics - and only i know where those lines are drawn. i think there's something special about that, in the same way that other personal musical ideas can be embedded in a piece just for oneself to appreciate a connection to. sort of launching off what you wrote about "trust your audience", to me it's almost that it doesn't matter to me whether the audience understands where it came from. or it matters less each time i try. i think it's awesome for people to get something unique from whatever i write. it's better for them to build those connections themselves than for me to say, "well this was my experience with such-and-such thing, this i wrote because of yada-yada."

it's been helpful for me to think this over a bit! especially since i've been doing more lyric writing again lately. thanks for sharing your thoughts as well, they helped me coalesce mine.

Wow! Thank you for the reply, Roz! I definitely did not expect this to be a whole forum post. I’ve been trying to write lyrics myself, and these absolutely help!

I'm guilty of having used a rhyming dictionary, but only when I write lyrics in English, which isn't my first language. Sometimes I don't know when two words rhyme, or I think they do based on Spanish phonetics when they actually don't.

Other than that, great guide. I write lyrics way less often than I write music, so it's good to have such valuable tips. Btw, I have a couple of songs I'd wish to write Japanese lyrics for them, but at my current Japanese level I'd end up writing pure nonsense :P .

i don't write lyrics or do vocals but i will take note of this for whenever i do :D

I personally use the "write out of order" bit A LOT when writing, not just lyrics really, anything. I'll come up or remember a very cool phrase from somewhere and say "wow thats a cool line, itll be in this spot" and then just build on that
This is a very insightful and useful list of things to have in mind! I might be trying singing myself at some point... who knows if you'll be hearing me in advent calendar!
I find writing - specially lyrics - really fun, but its kind of eh when i dont have the skill or the space to sing myself, which is something i really want to do at some point. Time will tell i guess lol
Excited to see what other people say here!

for what it's worth, i've never felt like a particularly good singer, but i do still enjoy practicing it and trying new things with my voice! i think even if you feel unskilled it can be a fruitful thing. space/privacy is a real concern though, i get that

I actually have a lot to say about this even though I don't write words very often.

components
It really helps to know what you're working with... verses have facets you can examine, or, you can take a verse and change just one component of it, like turning a knob on a synthesizer.

meter
Wikipedia has a good article

on this (just read the interesting looking charts), and I'm sure a poet could tell you more about this than me, but the important thing to understand is where the stress falls in a sentence. Just like a compound rhythm you can break syllables into chunks of 2 and 3. Verses with syllables lining up nicely will read in a way that will flow. Purposely using complicated groups of syllables will give you a different sound.

rhyme
Rhyming sounds good and makes you feel good. Unfortunately humans have a rough relationship with feeling good, so it's not that simple - rhyming might also sound insincere, or cliche. Think about rhyming your words, think about slant-rhyming your words, also think about not rhyming your words at all. Also, you'd be surprised how often you can sneak not rhyming past a listener, as in, a song that sounds like it rhymes but doesn't.
On the topic of sound, a verse's alliteration (big booty brothers), sibilance ("seven sad snakes") and assonance ("youtube 2 dudes") are even more atomic attributes to think about. Having a higher density of "ooh" than "eh" or more "buh" than "cuh" has a real effect on the sound of the song!

tone
Oh man this one sucks!! Words have an effect on every other word in a song just by being there. Some words are so strong they demand you to write a song around them instead of with them. I mean, you can't just suddenly say indubitably out of nowhere unless your song has an "indubitably" vibe. Or, throw this out the window and write something genius.

components 2
More structural stuff.

repetition
When you sing words it's pretty canonical that some of them repeat. But, which words? What if only half of the chorus repeats here... and the other half? This part repeats two times, but what if it repeated 4 times? 8? 100 times? What if I added an extra word word? Wait, sing the same verse again and end the song at 30 seconds... yes.

"in media res"
"In media res" is some sort of boring latin thing I don't care! But it means starting the movie in the good part of the movie (fight scene) instead of the boring exposition part (lame part). Um, my point is, move your interesting part around, maybe put something crazy as the first line to grab the listener. Or make the listener wait until the really cool part hits so it hits even harder.

This is the end of my comment!

great responses! i wanna back dami up in saying that even if you think you're a "bad" singer, you should try anyway. singing on-pitch is a skill you can improve like any other, most people just don't even try because they're too embarrassed. the shame is coming from inside you!

the discussion in this thread also prompted a few more thoughts from me:

know thyself
i think i work pretty similarly to dami when it comes to auotobiographical songwriting - i almost never do it, but often take inspiration from my own experiences, if only obliquely. an additional detail i'd like to share is that i often find that the most creatively fertile emotions are also the most embarrassing - jealousy, indecision, tongue-tiedness. weaving the most pathetic moments of my life into weird vignettes about imaginary people is basically therapy to me.

i have no idea how relatable this is to other BotBrs, but it works for this one. so - consider getting real self-critical but in a detached, productive way.

know the fundamentals
i really liked blower's comments on rhyme, particularly the part about thinking about rhyme even when you're not rhyming. it reminded me of this section from a few don'ts by an imagiste

by ezra pound, one of the great modernist poets:

Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to know harmony and counter-point and all the minutiae of his craft. No time is too great to give to these matters or to any one of them, even if the artist seldom have need of them.
pound was the pioneer of modern free verse, so if he says you should still care about rhyme even when you're not going to use it, we should pay attention!

* * *

some more thoughts on what i personally try to accomplish when writing songs:

romanticise the mundane
marcel proust was awestruck by the sensory onslaught of a plate of asparagus stalks and he turned that into a beautiful passage

in which he compares their beauty to alien lifeforms and fantasises about the smell reappearing in his pee later. what i'm saying is there's no such thing as unworthy material.

i don't have the skill to take things as far as proust, but i do try to find romance in mundane situations. i tried to make a love song about having crisps & beer for breakfast.

mix the personal with the epic
you can throw the pettiness of your emotional life into relief by putting it into an absurd or high-stakes situation. in my last entry i imagined someone so preoccupied with brooding over a personal tragedy that they can't bring themself to get excited about judgement day happening outside. i find that kind of stuff blackly funny, and approaching things that way lets you write about serious topics without taking yourself too seriously.

everything is about everything
this is what i was trying to gesture at, maybe too cryptically, with everything is about sex. you can can make a metaphor for anything out of anything else; just wing it and see what happens. you might just invent something new.

I don’t think I have a great voice, but I still want to try lyric writing and singing

that's the spirit!!!

i usually begin with a word, then stem outwards from it based on vibes, senses, memories, etc

rhymes r ez if u stick to common ones, but that oft makes my stuff sound unserious... (sometimes its a fun and simple game of rhyme matching, but its a real struggle if ur tryna make edgy shit)

ill actually typically just start by ad-libbing along the music until i find a sequence of words that sounds really fuckin cool, then from there draw the rest of the owl. this is not useful advice except the "adlib for a start" thing.

^^^ that's worked for me several times when i've been sketching out an instrumental and thought about adding vocals to it, definitely recommend. it's no different than feeling around for melodies or riffs or solo motifs or whatever really

I was never interested in writing music other than instrumentals, so i simply don't :)

You know what? That's totally fair, Midori, but I think there's so many ways you can use vocals not just for borderline singing (ambiance, glitches, atmosphere, filtering techniques, reverb, etc.) You can treat it like a waveform and play with it like an instrument!

singing random bullshit and going with what feels good

i dont write lyrics but while scrolling on reddit the internet i got my hands on a text that may help lyricists. i really liked it!

https://wooorm.com/write-music/

transcription incase link doesnt work:

"This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It's like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety.

Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals—sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader's ear. Don't just write words. Write music."

- Gary Provost

anything i say comes from the perspective of someone who can't set her sense of shame/embarrassment aside long enough to write lyrics (i hide behind an instrumental shield), but willie carlisle has a lot to say about the intersection between lyrics-as-poetry and the academic gatekeeping of the arts

there's a lot of writing out there on the theory of poetry, and it could potentially be useful to the budding (or experienced) lyricist, especially when it comes to questions of form/structure and meter as guideposts for putting phonemes together in aurally pleasing ways.

i know in my case, though, i get stuck far before any of those concerns, at the question with a demonstrably false premise "is this story worth telling", which i always incorrectly answer "no". like idk maybe i'll get over it and decide to write a song about my first memory (lmao it was drowning) or something, there are always goals to work toward

oooooooooohhhhhhhhhhh evidently i have one major contradictory opinion on this particular topic >:D i'm excited lol

ahem hem

one time porter robinson said "how do you do music? well, it's easy: you just face your fears and you become your heroes. i don't understand why you're freaking out"

this isn't really helpful advice, but it is a pretty baller line


THE RULES

1. there are no rules, only tools.

this is a big deal! and also kind of the other side of the coin to roz's "cliche's are cliche for a reason" idea. this goes for, quite literally, everything. i am the biggest proponent of making the most fucked up and absurd internal rhyming structures and yet some of my favorite songs ever rhyme, like, maybe two or three times.

there is no issue with following a certain "rule" if you find yourself inclined to do so, but do your best to not just follow it blindly. break it! see if the result sucks! and then, if it does, try and figure out what about the things you changed to break the rule caused it to suck relative to a rule-following version. over time, not only will you figure out the point of using that rule in the first place, but you will also likely stumble upon ways in which you can choose to not use it in ways that don't suck! et voila, your "rule" has become a tool.


GET WEIRD

do not be afraid to try shit. dear reader, you are the only person who can see this google doc. you can just write shit. tis allowed. spill your guts on the page and see what happens. oftentimes it will suck, but sometimes it will not, and, most commonly, it will suck in a way that is lowkey compelling, which provides you an angle by which to


WORKSHOP WORKSHOP WORKSHOP

see, to me, lyric writing is so much more a craft of revision than it is one of pure writing; chances are, you simply will not get a line right, or even all that good, on the first try. also, chances are, your second, and third, and fourth try will be worse than the first one! the point here is not to take the most direct path to goodness, but to instead learn what will and won't suck in the context of this song—ideally, each new try should make you a little more aware of the direction in which you want your song to go.

this, i think, is the core of why the one thing I am going to say will go against the grain of what others have been saying: my process very explicitly one of "it has to get worse before it gets better," such that when i take a bite of the forbidden fruit and it ends up tasting bad i can just spit it back out.

lmfao anyways


WRITE OUT OF ORDER

game designers often say that you should make the tutorial last, because smoothly teaching the player how to play your game is a very delicate act in which you can't make nearly as many assumptions about their understanding of your objectively cool mechanics. this is an excuse that i tell myself so that i can feel better about writing so many choruses before running and screaming every time it comes to writing a verse.

but also on a more granular level: a process that i find beyond helpful to just start with one line that you find REALLY compelling on its own, and filling in the surrounding lines to point your way towards it. Using roz's words—find that one important line by Knowing Thyself (aka ad lib your way to something really fuckin cool), and then write the rest to serve that one line, usually by building tension so that the one line can sucker-punch-release it. Note that, in the most common situation where that sucker punch line is naturally the last of a section, this process requires you to write backwards, starting from your objectively cool mechanic and working backwards through the tutorial that teaches the listener how to best appreciate it.

also, don't be afraid to put the pen down! if you find that one really fuckin cool line and then faceplant into a wall trying to build around it, then write down the really fuckin cool line and come back to the rest later! if your stuck-ness isn't quite so faceplanting-into-a-wall, though, try moving things around—words in a line, lines in a stanza, stanzas in the overall arrangement in a song. and if, after all that, you're STILL struggling to recall something that FEELS like it should exist, you may finally:


USE A RHYME DICTIONARY. USE A THESAURUS. BUT DO SO WITH TACT!!!!!

so uh... ahahah.. ha...... let me uh.... stop staring at me you're making me nervous D':

so the REASON that people say "don't use a rhyme dictionary" is the same exact reason as when people say "don't use a thesaurus" - if you use the words that pop up like mad libs to make your song feel nebulously "more correct," you will inevitably shove yourself into a connotative corner where all the vibes start to contradict and artistic intent just goes out the window.

so how does one use a rhyme dictionary "with tact"? like a resource!! this is not a tool to Tell You how to write your song—it's a tool to jog your memory, to make you think of things you otherwise might not have. if you don't know a word, then you do not use it, and if you REALLY want to use a word that you don't really know (because it sounds cool or whatever), it is OBLIGATORY that you then go and research that word for a solid stretch of time to figure out its usage and connotation. (aka. you go learn the word. such that you know it.) If said research leads you to realizing that, oh, this word doesn't really mean what I was hoping it would, then don't use it!! plain and simple.

also i do agree with what roz said about LLM generative AI crap. Rhyming dictionaries and thesauruses are at least built on rules that were explicitly created by other human beings. AI, however, has the unique capacity to average two different people's opposing opinions into one singular one that straight up does not exist in a real human mind. and there is quite literally no way to tell whether or not that is the case without having to do Genuine Research anyways. in which case you might as well have just done the research in the first place. or better yet, simply asked a friend or two for their opinions on the matter!

with all that said. if you are worried that looking at a rhyme dictionary WILL lead you to start mad-libs-ing, then it is extremely fair to avoid it. again, it is a tool, and not every tool is for everyone. which brings me, lastly, to


LEARN THY PROCESS

if you try out something suggested in this thread, and it's not really working for you, but other things are, then don't listen to that suggestion!!! everyone is different, and as such, our suggestions should simply be a jumping off point on your way to find your own process. there are no rules, only tools.


hope this helps :D and also hopefully this does not include any major grammatical errors as i did not spend all that much time workshopping it lol