Start to create your own song starting kit or use these ideas as a tool to exercise your creative mind. This part will mostly be exercises for you to kick start your writing journey. Let’s collect themes, titles and ideas!
Situation - Start with a situation [Theme]
Using a situation as a starting point will give you some direction and a lead to follow while your writing. The situation can be a conflict, a tragedy or something exiting och funny. Also think of what’s the peak of this situation, at some point emotions may run high or decisions are made. Look for the peak of the situation and build your song around it.
Let’s take relationship status as a situation, there’s much to choose from, the situation could be: ”People are trying to keep us apart”, ”I just met you and I’m falling in love”, ”I wonder if you’re leaving me", ”I want you to love me like I love you”. What could be the peak? And what’s the whole story? From who’s perspective are you gonna tell the story?
EXERCISE/ SITUATION
Write down 1-5 situations a song could be about.
Memory - Start with a memory [Theme]
Writing from a memory can be about a trip with your friends or family, a book or a movie you used to love as a child, the house you grew up in or a specific age and of course it can be about a past relationship, remembering the start or the end. Look within and use your own memories for inspirations and as a song starter. Focus on the feelings that comes along with it, you don’t need to be super specific, feel free to play around with that memory, change it in what ever way you like, maybe add a little extra to it. You can also think about why this memory was importen enough to store in your memory bank?
EXERCISE/ MEMORIES
Write down 1-5 memories a song could be about.
Feeling - Start with a feeling [Theme]
Start with a feeling and play around with that emotion. You can think about metaphors or references to that feeling ”what if anger were a storm?”.
EXERCISE/ FEELING
Write down 1-5 feelings a song could be about. You can also add a metaphor that could work with that emotion.
Titel- Start with a titel
A titel can be just one or a few words long. You can look up some cool words or write down words you like, or make up some short or long titles that you feel could work as a hook in a song or something to build a song around. It can be hard to just grab titles out of nothing, this is something you’ll learn to do, be aware of your surroundings, keep a your ears open for words and sentences that might be useable for songs, you might hear something in a movie or get inspired by something somebody said.
To start with we can use photographs or look through a book, newspaper, read some quotes or song lyrics and try to come up with your own answer to a song or play around with the theme. Be creative and be playful!
EXERCISE/ TITEL
Write down 1-5 titles that you can think of by just thinking of words, looking around where you are right now or by scrolling your phone.
Photograph- Start with a photo
You can get a lot of information out of a photograph and even more details if you really look at it with all of your senses and think beyond the photo. Let’s try it now and get some ideas, create a story by just looking at some photos.
EXERCISE/ PHOTOGRAPH
Write down as many titles or phrases that you can think of by just looking at these photos, don’t forget to use your senses and also think beyond the photograph.