Directed writing – add depth to your songwriting

I found myself in the unenviable position of having to sing an original song in 20 minutes and having only two verses, no melody, no chorus, and no final verse. Amazing as it sounds, I wrote a bridge, another verse and even shaky melody, and gave a performance that wasn’t awful.

This was the experience of day four of Paul Reisler’s directed writing course at Song School. The first three days we went through a process of developing the concepts and ideas for a song. As Paul stated, “premature writing destroys creativity,” “many songs suffer from a lack of depth.” In this class, we went to the bottom of the ocean.

The process was:
1) The story – We had a partner tell us a story about an event that transformed their lives. We were to listen and use this as the genesis of a songwriting idea. We were not tied to the story and had full liberty to change the event, add a different ending or write about something totally different.
2) Concept – Identify the transformation in one sentence and outline some points for a story.
3) Mind mapping – Taking the points identified, we then used a non-linear outlining technique called mind mapping to further define and describe.
4) Clustering - Circle key concepts that emerged and underline key images.
5) Free writing – We then went through a process of free writing (writing for a set time period with no editing, letting the pen flow) around an image or concept identified in the clustering exercise.
6) Identification of key points – We went back and highlighted key items that emerged in our writing.
7) Fairy Tale – We then transformed the key points from the free writing into a fairy tale, i.e. “Once upon a time...”
8) Creating metaphors – Taking key words from the fairy tale we then went through a mind mapping process to create a metaphor. This was a really cool process that hopefully I find time to describe later.
9) Putting it together - Writing and performing the song.

If this sounds like a lot of work, it was. It reminds me of the line that good songwriting is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.


The interesting thing was how easy it was to write the song after all the upfront work was done. For someone who typically writes with a guitar in hand and looks for words that rhyme, this was totally out of character. Also the song that developed was different from anything that I had written. Cool... Many of the others in the class had the same experience and some amazing performances were given on day 4.

Will I use this whole process again, maybe? Will I use some of the components, yes!


Would I recommend this workshop, definitely!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!