Page 46 - Song Maps - A New System to Write Your Best Lyrics - Simon Hawkins

How to write any title
One of the great benefits of writing with Song Maps is that you can now write pretty much any title by following the above four-step process. And I do mean ANY title.
However, I should make a few points clear:
1. Not all titles make great lyrics – while I promise you can write ANY title with Song Maps–i.e. turn any title into a coherent lyric–I can't guarantee they will all be GREAT lyrics. The fact is, some titles are more writable than others and will produce better lyrics than others. And that is why we need Song Maps: to figure out where on the scale of writable/unwritable the title sits before it's too late. After all, you don't want to spend all your precious creative time beating your head against a brick wall.
2. Working with both sides of the brain – for some readers, the approach in this book will seem like I'm suggesting we apply some left-brain, logical processing around what you might consider an exclusively right-brained, creative process. Or putting limitations around something that should be limitless and imaginative. Yes, that is exactly what I'm suggesting. However, I'd ask you to suspend judgment until you have given this a go because I firmly believe you would otherwise be missing a trick. As Phil Hansen says in his brilliant TED talk, "Embrace the Shake," sometimes "Embracing a limitation can drive creativity."
3. The lyric still has to be written – Song Maps don't write the songs for you. There's a saying among songwriters that you don't write a song; you rewrite it. This is still very much the case when you use Song Maps. The biggest way they save time is on deciding what you write not so much how you write it. That part of the crafting process is still very individual and down to you to develop in your own way.
4. Crafting still matters – when you apply the techniques in this book, it's tempting to think that a mechanical process will work every time. That's certainly not the case. Without a doubt this process will help you write better songs but of course every song needs carefully crafting. So please do bear in mind the other elements needed to create authentic, genuine lyrics that use appropriate language, phrasing, prosody, lyrics to music, consistent rhyme schemes, etc. because they all matter hugely and will be essential to you in crafting your best songs.
Having said all of the above, in Chapter 5, we will look at how to apply seven universal Song Maps to seven neutral titles and turn them into writable ideas. At the end of this book I will demonstrate how a Song Map can be used to turn even the most impossible title into a writable idea.