One of the most exciting ways to learn any art form is to take in great works by great artists.
Listening to music can be a real pleasure.
Musicians should listen to music. Lyricists should read. Songwriters of all kinds should read and listen to music. To get the most out of these encounters with brilliance, it’s best to listen not just for pleasure, but also for understanding of what you’re hearing. And to get the most out of reading, it’s best to stop, copy down passages of writing you love, and spend some time examining what makes them so powerful.
If you learn what makes a piece of writing powerful, you give yourself a shot at writing something that’s just as good (or even better).
That’s exactly why Renaissance-era writing teachers asked their students to keep a copybook.
What is a Copybook?
A copybook is simply an ordinary notebook that you use to copy down passages of writing. You’ll want to copy down any great passages of lyric that you encounter, of course, but you don’t have to limit yourself to merely that. You can also copy down lines of dialogue from novels, poems that speak to you on a personal level, quotes that strike you as clever, jokes that standup comedians tell… you can record any form of great writing that crosses your path.
Basically anything that appeals to you can — no, must! — be copied into your copybook for safekeeping. Your copybook starts blank, and your job is to slowly and steadily fill it up with intriguing and well-crafted bits of writing from other people. Eventually it’ll be an entire 150+ pages stuffed with examples of great writing. What could be better than that?
Writing can be practiced.
Just reading texts about songwriting technique, music theory, or creative writing won’t do much for you other than provide some entertainment. The whole purpose of reading a book or taking a course like this one is to learn its contents well through study…and then use what you learn. Why else would we bother to read about rhyme schemes, the harmonic minor scale, or song forms?
One way to sharpen your familiarity with these techniques and concepts is to label them wherever they appear in the writings or the music of others. Once you learn a technique, look and listen for it in the things you read and the music you hear. This brings techniques to life! It reinforces what you’ve learned and opens your eyes to highly creative, exciting examples of those techniques in action.
Your copybook, like your journal, is a place to explore what you like and what you don’t like about the creative work of others. What appeals to you? What’s intriguing to you? Over time, you’ll notice patterns in your own taste — important clues about the kinds of work you want to create.
Use what you know about creative writing to analyze what’s going on technically in each passage that you love. What appeals to you about this passage? Is there a particularly vivid image? A startling metaphor? A great line of dialogue? A clever rhyme?
Even if the writer you’re studying only uses these formal techniques in an untrained, instinctive way, you can still analyze their work in technical detail. This is the heart of why songwriters study music theory and rhetoric and grammar: because these fields teach you to notice how techniques can be used to create good work.
Simply by paying a little more attention than the average reader or listener, you can learn a lot more from the experience.
An Important Distinction: Form and Content
When you’re analyzing a lyric, you’ll want to pay attention both to the lyric’s form and the lyric’s content.
Content: the core topic, feeling, or story being expressed through the lyric. What’s the song’s basic premise?
Form: the techniques, exact words and phrasing, and other strategies that a writer uses to bring the lyric’s core idea to life. This includes things like sensory description, rhyme, alliteration, and all the myriad figures of speech.
Form and content are woven tightly together in finished works, and listeners usually experience both at the same time. By taking care to examine both form and content, you can unravel that tight relationship and gain a better understanding of all the moving parts of a lyric.
Get messy.
I encourage you to go ahead and copy down some lyrics that you love.
Once you’ve done that, feel free to go ahead and scribble all over your copy of the lyric. Mark it up! Underline passages that you like. Notate the rhyme scheme down the right margin of the page next to the lyric. Make observations about the lyric’s structure, the writer’s choice of words, and so on.
Often our musical and lyrical interests vary. Some songwriters have such wide tastes in music that they have a hard time sorting out exactly what kinds of material they themselves want to write! Using a copybook to digest your eclectic mix tapes can offer you a chance to learn from a variety of music genres — so that you can pour it all into the melting pot that is your own voice as a songwriter.
A notebook is nearly free — why not use it to learn all of the tricks your songwriting idols use?