Page 21 - Song Maps - A New System to Write Your Best Lyrics - Simon Hawkins

Reason 3 - To see the full potential of a title
We all have our own ways of writing. Sometimes it's based on what inspires us the most, recent life lessons, conversations we've had or devotions we've read. Sometimes it helps to look at our ideas in different ways. For example:
Changing the person in the lyric from "me" to "him/her" or vice versa
Changing the tense of the lyric
Swapping the second Verse with the first Verse (a helpful trick if you do happen to get stuck on Second Verse Curse)
Changing the chord progressions
Changing the key from major to minor or vice versa
Swapping instruments–e.g. from piano to guitar or maybe even writing without an instrument
All of these things are very helpful for mashing things up to help you write something a little different. But Song Maps take this one step further: it helps you sketch any number of destinations for your title, places that you might not have seen the song going to unless you had a number of pre-defined lyric routes to apply, and use your imagination to figure out what serves the song best before even writing a word of your lyric.
What happens when you hear a song title?
When you first hear a potential song title, what do you do next? Many commercial songwriters would ask themselves questions like:
How does that title speak to me?
Is there anything in real life I could bring to a title like that? Have there been any other songs written about that title?
Is there a similar title that hasn't been written previously? What could this song be about?
Who could I imagine singing this song?
Some songwriters also ask the question, "Where could this title go?"
This is where Song Maps come into their own–by providing a number of well-trodden development paths. And with these, you can quickly take any title on a journey from where it might start to where it might finish. And then you can play with it to see if a variation might work even better. This is the secret to being able to write ANY song title–including those that you might have thought are impossible to write.
Seeing the full potential of a title
We will look in more detail at how to write with Song Maps in Chapter 4, but the joy of using them is that, within a short space of time (which becomes shorter the more you use them), you can assess five or ten different development paths for any title and from all these possibilities select the option that you consider the most writable, commercial, funny, authentic...whatever result you're looking to achieve.
In short, with Song Maps, you can see a number of options that can be developed from your title with a