Dedicated songwriters have a lot of craft to learn. Rhyme schemes, lifelike description, structure… every song poses unique challenges. It’s a lot of fun to rough out a lyric with scruffy charm and promise—but it feels even better to take that early draft and use your knowledge of craft to build it up from average to good, from good to great.

Don’t be afraid to revise your work! The process simultaneously hones your current song and your songwriting skills. It’ll only make you stronger. 😉

An Entirely New Set of Songwriting Tools

Rewriting a song feels entirely different from writing a new one. While writing a first draft, you’re getting to know the characters, establishing a situation, developing the story—you’re feeling it all out, making up the rules as you go. It’s perfectly alright to sketch the song out in broad, rough strokes during these early drafts. Be as messy as you like!

That initial pencil sketch is a great starting point. While rewriting, you’ll find yourself erasing whole sections of the picture, cutting it into pieces, pasting it back together, tracing the “keeper” lines in ink, and applying color.

By consciously separating rough drafts from revision, you free yourself up for wild, uninhibited creativity early on—and careful craft later.

It’s a good idea to set aside a rough draft for at least a few hours. Or a day. Or even a week—but make sure you come back to it!

Big Changes, Little Changes

When you return to your song an hour or a week later, you’ll have partially forgotten its details—and assuming you documented the draft carefully, that’s a good thing!

As you reacquaint yourself with the lyric or listen to the recording again, you experience it almost the way its future listeners will. You’ll be surprised at your own plot twists, wooed by your clever rhymes, transported by your own rich sensory descriptions…

…and irritated by everything that’s not quite as brilliant as you thought it was when you wrote it.

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Revision tip: focus on the big problems first.

If an entire verse needs rewriting, or the plot as a whole is flawed, you should probably work on those bigger issues before you fuss over individual word choices and other fine details. There’s no sense in agonizing for twenty minutes over the perfect word for a line that isn’t going to make the final cut anyway.

Once the song as a whole is somewhat stable, it’ll make more sense to mind the small things.

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Rewriting can be taxing! As you work on the song, you’ll gradually lose perspective on it. The speed at which it wears you out will vary, but here’s a good general rule: when the song ceases to excite you, or when you can no longer tell what’s working and what isn’t, wrap up work on that song for the day—don’t waste your time sitting around making changes when you’ve lost all sense of what needs changing. Go do something else for a while—you’ll return later with fresh eyes and ears.

Things to do between sessions

• Study songwriting books and blogs
• Listen to new music (or music that’s new to you)
• Critique and analyze the songs of others
• Participate on songwriting forums
• Start a new song, or revise a different one

I particularly like that latter solution. Nothing gives you objectivity and distance on one song faster than working on another!

More useful ideas for writing and rewriting

• 17 Killer Intro Ideas for Your Songs
• Writer’s Block or Building Blocks?
• The Seductive Dangers of Moleskines
• Write Better Songs Faster Using a Lyric Palette
• Try Index Cards for Non-Linear Songwriting