One thing I hear again and again from songwriters is that they find lyric writing much more difficult than writing music. You can go to almost any music store and find someone who’ll help you practice chords and scales on a guitar, but good luck finding a teacher who’ll coach you on mostly-forgotten writing techniques like epimone, which in writing means repetition of the same request or plea. The Beatles’ song “Help!” is an example.
Almost every musician has heard of music theory, and most musicians recognize that theory is helpful to know.
But something many writers—including professional writers—aren’t aware of nowadays is that writing also has a rich and complete system of theory. Just as music theory provides a framework for understanding the role of every note, every chord, and every articulation used in a melody… the art of rhetoric strives to notice patterns in writing that’s effective and emotionally moving.
In school many of us learned what metaphors and similes are. We learned how to rhyme. You may remember learning about personification and alliteration in a literature class. But many of us don’t end up using those figures of speech very often outside of the classroom. In time, we mostly forget about them, or maybe just use them in an instinctive and informal way once in a while.
I believe that reviewing and practicing these fundamentals is crucial to a lyricist. Learning grammar and rhetoric is just as useful as music theory. If you do choose to dig into rhetoric, you’ll find that metaphors, similes, and alliteration are only the very beginning. For centuries now, scholars of rhetoric have been noticing, naming, and organizing techniques. By my count, there are now hundreds of different techniques and concepts for any writer to rediscover for songwriting.
You’ve likely constructed some metaphors in your life. You’ve made some analogies. You’ve used imagery. But have you tried chiasmus? Procatalepsis? Irony? Hyperbole? Climax? Gradatio?
Don’t let the complicated-sounding names fool you. Each one of these terms represents one simple, very useful little technique that can be learned and practiced and used to write something beautiful.
Most songwriters just keep writing song after song, and listen to lots of songs, and just sort of hope they’ll absorb the elements of great writing through osmosis. But I believe any songwriter who makes a serious study of rhetoric will progress much, much faster. Being deliberate and intentional about your own songwriting education is of course going to be more difficult, but also more effective than just drifting along, hoping for the best and leaving your advancement to chance.
At this point in time, very few songwriters are serious students of the craft of writing. That’s an advantage for anyone who makes time for daily practice of rhetoric’s many concepts and tools.