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(More customer reviews)Pat Pattison has produced what is the ultimate book on lyric writing. Actually, Pattison's exercises and techniques are valuable for any aspect of creative writing, from poetry to fiction.
He begins the book with the staple of his teaching, "Object Writing". Object writing is defined as writing on a specific thing - it can be anything from polyester to holding your breath - while incorporating as many senses as you can: touch, taste, smell, etc. The exercises last for 10 minutes, exactly, and you do it every day. He likens this to a pearl diver holding his breath and diving for pearls. Each time you hold your breath a little longer, dive a little deeper. It's the same with object writing. At first your writing will be awkward and fragmented - and that's okay. But as you do it on and on, eventually you will hit that vein, that underground river where your creativity rolls free and the words will pour out. As you continue it day to day, you'll hit this river more and more frequently and at greater depths, until eventually you'll just exist there.
Here's the amazing thing - it works. Object writing on a regular basis has improved my reading ability, my writing ability, my comprehension skills - my overall thinking. It gets your brain in shape and gets you in better touch with the powerful subconscious parts of your mind, where the majority of creativity happens.
From here he brings you more into the disciplined aspects of writing, showing you how to build a worksheet to write a lyric from. It involves object writing on your lyric title or concept and extracting anything useful from that, then using a thesaurus and rhyming dictionary to brainstorm even more ideas, and to place these on a worksheet to write from, giving you tons of related ideas at your fingertips.
He then discusses verse development, song forms, rhyme structures and meter. It goes very deep into these topics, and you can go as far as you want.
It's one of those books that you can continually read, diving into various chapters as you get stuck in different parts of different songs you are writing. I highly recommend this book for any aspiring lyric writers, even for composers who want a better understanding of the lyric writing process.
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Pattison presents a unique, in-depth approach to the process of lyric writing. Songwriters will examine 17 extraordinary songs and learn the distinct elements that make them so effective. Pattison then presents more than 30 lyric-writing exercises designed to achieve the same results. From generating lyric ideas and managing repetition to developing verses, it's all here. Songwriters will: find warm-up exercises that revolutionize songwriting imagery; use a rhyming dictionary and a thesaurus to generate ideas and find snappy rhyme; create meaningful metaphors and similes while avoiding cliches; develop verses by using or breaking conventional rules; experiment with point of view in every lyric to make a song stand out--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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