Stealing From Songwriters - I wrote a book!
My first step into the world of self-publishing
In my opinion, songwriting is an untapped resource for writers.
Think about it.
Songwriters have the knack of telling powerful, emotional stories with an economic use of words, in an often short period of time.
That’s a skill we’d all like to master, isn’t it?
I wrote a post a few months back called
These 7 Techniques Ed Sheeran Uses Can Accelerate Your Writing which really got me thinking about how us writers have a lot to learn from those who have mastered songwriting.
I thought about the songwriters that have really moved me over the years, and how they employed different techniques to create character, mood and feeling in their lyrics.
I thought about Michael Stipe from R.E.M, and how he uses seemingly disparate abstract phrases to create a narrative. You can’t quite put your finger on the story, but it’s in there somewhere. What is there in bucketloads, is a mood or a feeling.
I thought about Nick Cave, who can create fleshed-out characters and a whole story that you care about within a couple of minutes, with some carefully-crafted lyrics. What dark magic is this? How does he do it?
I wanted to know. And I get the feeling that you might too.
So, I wrote a mini book to explore the lyrical style of 10 of the world’s greatest musical storytellers.
I did it by:
taking a closer look at how these songwriters craft their lyrics
quoting some of the lyrics so readers can see what I mean
identifying some key songs that readers can listen to get to know the artist better
creating a writing prompt exercise to help readers draw valuable insights and add more technique to their own writing
I created the cover in Adobe Photoshop and pulled the book together using Scrivener. I’ll probably talk about the technical aspects of bringing it to life in another post.
For today, I’m just pleased that I’ve been able to publish my first mini book.
I’m proud to share it with you. You can start learning from it straight away.
Thanks for reading!
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