Page 20 - Song Maps - A New System to Write Your Best Lyrics - Simon Hawkins

Reason 2 - To save and protect precious creative time
There have been seasons in my life when I've had a lot of time to write and others when I haven't. It's at those times I've often thought to myself:
"Why am I not writing more? Surely there can be nothing more important to me than getting to my piano and writing a song?"
You may have felt the same thing. But part of achieving balance in life is that we can't spend all our time writing. Anything that can help make us more productive during the time we can spend writing is nothing short of a gift. Well, Song Maps are one of those gifts.
Making the most of your creative time
The hours and minutes we spend in the writing room, whether on our own or with a co-writer, are all- precious. Some writers have certain days they can spend writing; some have certain times of certain days.
Whenever you schedule your writing time, Song Maps can help make the most of this precious creative time in a number of ways:
It provides a focus for your writing – By Mapping out where your lyric starts and finishes, you can get a feel for the emotional impact of a song without having to spend three hours writing a complete lyric.
It stops you from writing impossible titles – If you get to the end of the Mapping process, and you are still struggling with what the song is trying to say, you are able to just put it back in your hook book and save it for another day rather than bang your head against a brick wall for hours on end.
It stops you from wasting time writing second-rate ideas – Sometimes titles fall between being able to write themselves and being almost un-writable. These second-rate ideas tend only to show themselves after working on them for a while. By Mapping out your lyric in advance of writing, you can fast-forward effectively to when it's finished and figure out much faster if it is not going to turn out well.
It provides a template to write from – By presenting you with a range of alternative but workable places to go with your idea, you can save time trying to figure out what the next step in the song should be. Especially when confronted with the dreaded Second Verse Curse (more on that later).
In short, by filtering out what can and can't be written up front, Song Maps will save you a significant amount of precious creative time so with the time you have left you are free to concentrate on the other crafting aspects of writing the very best ideas you have in your idea bank.