Getting Started With Sensory Writing
Many songwriters feel nervous when it comes to writing lyrics. After all, there is not a one-size-fits-all list of characteristics great lyrics always follow. What feels cliché for one artist is “just what the doctor ordered” for another. Depending on genre, our lyrics may lead the song experience or they may simply hang in the background, merely working off of the musical experience that dominates our enjoyment of the song. So in all the mixed messages around great lyric writing, how do we songwriters know what kind of lyric works in context of the music we write, and how do we know when our lyric is done?
There are many tools for gaining confidence, structure, and clarity when it comes to lyric writing. By far, the most important and foundational tool I have found in all my 20+ years of songwriting and teaching lyric writing is “sensory writing.” Sensory writing is writing from the senses of taste, touch, sight, sound, smell, and movement. When we use our senses, we encourage the listener to feel what we feel, instead of standing on the outside of the experience. Poets, short story writers, and novelists know this type of language well, as it’s the sensory detail that engages the reader or listener in connecting with the characters. The difference between creative storytelling and songwriting comes down to how much sensory language we use and where we use it, with songs requiring us to economize our ideas.
Pictures tell a thousand words, and it’s no less true for sensory language in our lyrics. When we show instead of tell, we convey loads of information in just a few short lines. So when it comes to writing lyrics, we often don’t recognize that we are in control of the balance between how much we show and how much we tell. This balance, which changes from genre to genre, can be a wonderful characteristic by which we can evaluate whether our song lyrics are effective and ready to be laid down in the ‘finished’ pile.
Sensory Writing Practice:
A great way to get started with sensory writing is to set aside 6 minutes every day of uninterrupted time to write, stream-of-consciousness, on whatever device you feel most comfortable. For some, it’s a laptop or iPad. For others, a pencil and paper. And others prefer a kind of verbal stream-of-consciousness output, where we dictate instead of write.
Once you’ve gotten comfortable, start each 6-minute session by choosing a ‘keyword’ from which to write. This keyword can be a thing, such as a teacup, a place, such as the airport, a time, such as midnight on your birthday, or a person, such as your Aunt June. Keywords that are broad tend to leave us with that old dreaded writer’s block—when this happens, simply shift to something more specific. Instead of writing about Aunt June, write about Aunt June cooking in your childhood kitchen growing up. Or, write about your grandfather working on the old Ford in the garage. Notice how these images involve both a person and a place.
After you’ve chosen your keyword, dive right into your senses, and without lifting your fingers from the keyboard, continue to write through the entire 6 minutes. At first, you may fear a lack of ideas. Like mindfulness or meditation, resist the urge to label the lack of ideas as bad or problematic, and breathe deeply as you focus again on the keyword and the sight, sound, smell, touch, taste, and movement details you see in your mind. For this exercise, there is no good or bad detail, right or wrong way of expressing that detail, or song-worthy or not-song-worthy sentence or phrase. There is only the keying into your senses as you bring a memory or fantasy to life. If you recognize that you’ve drifted into telling rather than showing, gently nudge yourself back to your senses. Keep your daily writings filed by keyword, and refer back to them often for song concept ideas and titles you may like to write into verses or full songs.
In the writing courses I teach, sensory writing is the foundational practice leading to a sustainable creative routine as well as high-quality lyric writing. It can be difficult to understand how this daily writing leads directly to a highly attuned sense of lyric writing, but it is a practice I recommend, without reservation, that quickly results in stronger skills with language.
One way to expand your sensory writing skills is to attend one of my upcoming songwriting retreats.
Stay creative,
Andrea Stolpe
