The Lyric Writer's Workroom

Songwriting tips, techniques, and ideas

Three Essential Lyric Writing Tools

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Here are a few books that I find myself referring to again and again.

Making proper use of these will enliven your writing and help you dislodge yourself when you get stuck. Whether you climb on the library ladder to scourge the topmost shelves for them, or you have copies of them at home – use them to lever yourself out of predicaments or to search for ideas.

Then of course there are online versions of all these resources-but I recommend sticking with a flesh-and-blood hard copy of each. The hardbound ones can be beautiful, and they serve as visual writing reminders in your home. There’s also less danger of taking “just a second” to check e-mail while you should be focusing on mining rhymes for the best song ever.

1. Dictionary.dict[3]

A good dictionary will help you pinpoint the exact meaning and spelling of almost any word you could ever want to use. Most of us guess meanings based on the context in which we’ve heard or read a given word.

Make a habit of looking up words that you’re even a little fuzzy on—you’ll learn something every time, and you never know when you’ll see a word that inspires an entirely new train of thought.

thesaurus[9]2. Thesaurus

A thesaurus is great for those moments when a particular word doesn’t seem quite right for the thought you’re trying to convey.

For best results, look for the kind that contains both an alphabetically-arranged list of synonyms and a directory of concepts.

3. Rhyming Dictionary

rhymedict[4]There’s no better way to quickly find all available options for rhyming that killer line you wrote just a moment ago.

Some people take a stern eye to these, but rhyming dictionaries aren’t responsible for forced, shoehorned rhymes… songwriters are responsible for forced, shoehorned rhymes.

To put it another way, don’t blame the hammer for the crooked nails of an inept carpenter. Rhyming dictionaries are perfectly fine tools.

pocketrhyme[3]4. Miniatures of all the Above.

If I could, I’d lug all three of my biggest references around with me everywhere I went.

To avoid looking any geekier than I already do, I buy compact versions of each that’ll fit in a guitar case or even a pocket. If I get an idea while I’m out gigging or otherwise away from home, I can look it up right away. And if I know I’m likely to spend some time waiting around in a lobby or a long line, I can even write in a small notebook, with the benefit of a compact reference library if I should need it. Can’t beat that.

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Note: If you purchase these books through the links above, a percentage of the sale benefits this website and my efforts as a music scholar, musician, and teacher. However, you can also likely find these books cheaply at used book stores and library sales. I’m a purist; I like having hard copies of these books around-but there are also fine online resources that work just as well, though there’s more danger of distraction.

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Comments

  1. Matt Blick

    Was check dictionary last night for a song (online). YOu make a good point about email distraction though, I’d not thought about that.

    Now I have a confession to make. I own all of these things. I use a dictionary occasionally. I sometimes use a thesaurus. I have NEVER found anything I could use in a rhyming dictionary that I could use. I’ve tried, I really have, but it has never worked for me. I feel almost a freak and a failure for saying so but there it is.

    Maybe because I have my own little rhyme finding system.

    If I want a rhyme for cat, I’ll go alphabetically and write down the rhymes. sometimes a half rhyme or something that chimes will come up ‘had’ and I’ll do a new list and rhyme that. These are the ones that feel natural to me.

    Whatever else I can get out of dictionary seem to be ‘forced’ or me trying to be clever.

    BTW one thing you’ve missed is grammar. There are some songs out that drive me nuts because the guys needs to get his grammar sorted.

    • Nicholas Tozier

      Hey Matt!

      I may poke around online to research an idea, but otherwise I don’t like to be connected to the Internet while writing. I always end up checking website stats, looking at e-mail, chasing Wikipedia tangents, etc.

      Thanks for giving some insight into your rhyming process–I actually do the same thing, except I don’t list them by going through the alphabet, I do it by looking up the near-rhymes and such that you’re referring to. I usually end up looking around for a minute, but almost always turn up a word that clicks into place by triggering some part of my brain to produce a phrase.

      I share your frustration about grammar problems in songs. I don’t expect perfect formal sentence structure, but even so there are some glaringly strange choices out there.

      “He’s a complicated man, but no one understands him but his woman…” -bad grammar from “Shaft.”