Where To Start Songwriting: 3 Tools
by Stanley Chris
This is usually the hardest part for many an aspiring songwriter: where do I start? I would like to share three vital tools that helped me cross this bridge with you and, hopefully, they will give you a hand in your quest for creative achievement too.
1. Passion for the art
Through my years in school, right from primary school, when I had enough sense to understand language, I have had an unexplainable awe for words. They are more than a combination of letters to me; their very presence sends chills down my spine! I have been an ardent lover of literature ever since, and my passion for language has only increased as time has passed by.
Remember that you are seeking to express something through songwriting, maybe an emotion, an experience, an idea, etc. For a songwriter, familiarity with the language you adopt as the medium for your art is absolutely mandatory, and the better that familiarity, the easier it will be for you to use words persuasively. The technicalities aside, you should have a general love for words, and be able to romance with them most intimately in the deep quiet of your soul; if words move you, it is almost certain that you will use them in a moving way. How do you cultivate this affection? The same way you develop any relationship, through regular and deliberate interaction, which will not be a problem if you honestly feel attracted to songwriting as an art.
2. Study and application
That brings us to the second tool: study. Before I started writing my own songs, long before I even imagined myself writing songs, I got into the habit of really studying songwriting as an art, even though my focus then was to merely appreciate poetry, which I was writing a lot of around that time. I learned structure at this juncture and figured that there wasn't much difference between poetry and songs since a song, in most cases where the details of its art are attended to, is actually a poem wrapped in melody!
That is how I got to writing my first song which, funny enough, didn't incorporate a lot of poetry in terms of the common essentials like rhyme, alliteration, etc. With more study and growing, I later revised the song a couple of times, because I realized that it needed a bit of tidying up. Be that as it may, I was on my way, and I've been ever since. 10th of March this year marked exactly one and a half years since I started writing songs, and on that day I wrote my 560th song! Yes, in that short space, will no personal coaching, just study and more study, learning how to develop songs in different ways, and putting what I was learning to work in order to better my craft. You can easily see that the habit will most assuredly translate into definite results if you inculcate it into your own practice.
3. Persistence
That brings us to our last point on persistence. Napoleon Hill, in his classic book "Think and Grow Rich", devoted an entire Chapter to this factor which he listed among his thirteen principles of success. He wrote: "There may be no heroic connotation to the word persistence but the quality is to the character of man what carbon is to steel!" Ed Sheeran, described by John Elton as one of the best songwriters of this generation, in the documentary titled "Songwriter", talks about songwriting as a dirty tap in an old house which, at first, spits out dirty water for a while before it starts giving out the first bits of clean water. Some dirt will still follow the first drops of clean water every now and then but after a while, nothing but clean water flows out. That was a confirmation for me that I was on the right track persisting in writing more and more songs because I had noticed that the more I wrote the better I got. Occasionally, I write a song that does not feel quite like it but, like Ed said, write it all the same and finish it so that you get it out of your system; otherwise, it'll affect the subsequent songs that you write. He suggests that you try to write a song a day as an exercise in writing. The interesting thing with songs is that some days you have a flood of them streaming into your consciousness from nowhere, and on other days you barely seem to be able to get something decent down. That's why it's a good idea to pile up the "bad" songs you write on those days when you have trouble hatching genius on a shelf somewhere. You'll take a look at it at some point in the near or far future and find you have a lot of different ways you could better it to become an excellent song, given everything else you'd be learning as you study and gather more inspiration.
At this point, I have written more songs than I'd need for a career in music but I still write, as often as I can, to better myself as a writer. Why don't I stop, when I have every reason to? As Kobe Bryant said, "I'm chasing perfection;" this is one of those things I'd gladly trade the days of my life completely immersed in, so I decided I'll push it to the limit! That is the kind of attitude that will take you to those classics you wish to write. Sometimes, when I write what I think is a really great song, I wonder to myself what a gem I'd have missed had I stopped writing, or had I not written that day. So, write, write, and write; until the words bleed!
Find Stanley's lyrics here: https://www.premiumlyrics.com/en-eu/lyrics/artist/stanley-chris
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