Page 13 - Song Maps - A New System to Write Your Best Lyrics - Simon Hawkins

Do we have a plan for how we spend money?
Do we have a plan for the rest of our day, week, year? Do we have savings for a rainy day?
Even if you can't say yes to all of these, wouldn't you agree that having a plan is better than not having a plan?
It's the same with your craft. God has blessed us with brains that process both reasoning and creativity. If we can use our whole brain to write songs, I believe we will write better songs. This is what Song Mapping is all about.
The big difference between using Song Maps and a simple lyric sketch is that, rather than leaving the direction of your lyric to chance, with Song Maps you write using predefined, tried and tested successful templates to develop the title, ensuring effective lyric development and providing you with a solid payoff.
In this chapter, I run through how I discovered Song Maps before setting out the top-five reasons why I continue to use them today, having made it an essential part of my own songwriting workflow.
How I discovered Song Maps
I discovered Song Maps out of desperation. When I was first signed as a staff songwriter to Universal Music Publishing in Nashville, I regularly travelled the 20-hour, 4,181-mile trip from my home in Felpham on the south coast of England to Cool Springs, Nashville to co-write with other staff writers and artists. I'd go five or six times a year, for a couple of weeks each time. While I was there, thanks to Holly Zabka, my fabulous Creative Director, my calendar was often jammed with writing appointments– sometimes two or three a day.
Nashville is an extraordinary place in that it seems to operate on a totally different concept of time from the rest of the world–not Central Time, but what my wife and I often jokingly called "Nashville-stretchy- time." Let me just say that maybe 80% of the appointments on my calendar would actually happen.
It was, therefore, crucial for me to arrive in the writing room ready to serve my co-writers well. The most stupid thing in the world would be for me to go to all that trouble and hassle only to arrive in the writing room with no ideas. Or even worse, with half-baked, clichéd or sucky ideas. I, therefore, needed a consistent source of great, writable ideas and behind it a robust system to find them. The idea of Song Maps developed out of that.
What I didn't realize is how much Song Maps would transform my writing–whether I was writing on my own or with one of my 80 wonderful co-writers.
Having used this technique for a number of years now, there are so many good reasons to use Song Maps it's difficult to capture them all. Out of all the research and reading I have done on my journey as a songwriter, this approach has helped my writing the most.
The fact that Song Maps were something I developed on my own–rather than read in a book or found in a course–is the main reason I wanted to write this book: to share it with my fellow travellers and help them