Exercises in Imitation
1. Condense a lyric down to its essential content or theme. Summarize its basic premise, idea, or situation in a short sentence or two.
2. Keep content, change form. Choose a single line of lyric that you like—either your own or somebody else’s—and express its meaning using totally different language than the original.
3. Keep form, change content. Now take that same line of lyric you chose and imitate its basic form while substituting entirely new content.
4. Write down the Four Categories of Change on the inside cover of your practice journal to refer to whenever you’re feeling creatively stuck. You could also hang them on the wall of your practice space. Once again, here are the four categories:
add something,
subtract something that’s already there,
rearrange its elements, or
replace selected elements.