Page 70 - Song Maps - A New System to Write Your Best Lyrics - Simon Hawkins

Map 4 - Places
This is also a great Map for telling stories, with the plot unfolding in different locations rather than at different times.
This Map doesn't necessarily require you to use the name of different countries or cities; it just needs to give enough information about the different places for the singer to establish the plot development. It could even refer to various states of mind or "places" the singer might be in.
Much like with Timezones, the fact that different places are used in each Verse (and maybe the Bridge as well) means the story is more likely to move forward naturally. This also means the Chorus, as the unifying element of the song, will need to work well for every place the song goes.
One tip: to make a Chorus work well with different Verses in this Map, a neat trick is to zoom out from the specifics of your lyric to summarize the heart of your lyric in the Chorus. This way you are not committed to figuring out how to work in the same set of fine detail in each Verse. One way of doing this is to build a simpler Chorus, maybe repeating the title two or three times with an offsetting line with a setup rhyme for the last line, which may well contain the title.
Places is another great Map to use for storytelling, so this is perfect for writing Country, Pop, Southern Gospel and other genres.
Of course, there's an opportunity to get poetic with the lyric in developing subplots, so the song moves literally from one place to another but also moves the characters from one place to another metaphorically.
What does places look like?
With Places, we paint a picture in Verse 1, which sets up the idea of the title in the Chorus.
Verse 2 moves the story along, but from a different place, before again setting up the idea of the title in the Chorus. The Bridge can either be a third place and/or the payoff of the song.
The trick to this Map is to ensure an effective return to the Chorus from the different scenes or scenarios painted in the Verses and the Bridge, maybe using a Pre-Chorus set up.
While the most obvious use of this is to reference different geographical places, it is totally applicable to any "place" whether geographical, emotional, stress level or other dimension that you would like to write from. Or maybe even combine them?
The Places Map can be represented as follows: