“Do not, however, use a rhyming dictionary. I knew a guy who did and his writing sucked.”
I have to disagree. What sucks are lyrics where you can see the rhyme coming, you know it’s coming, you hate that it’s coming, you can’t believe anybody would use that rhyme again…ever, and yet…ugh, there it is. Believe me, our brains will seek the easy, familiar rhyme unless we work around it. Our brains know what comes next. Why, because that’s how it works. You know how to get where you are going because of familiar queues. The lyricist job is to show you something different when you are traveling along.
So change your rhymes, change your adjectives, try not to use absolutes, always, never, and throw away all the just’s and really’s. Fill those missing words with something more, rework the line , choose to change the trope.
I end up disliking all my lyrics after a while, unless they’ve found music. Music and melody are great equalizers for bad lyrical choices. Especially melody. But, a new setting or story can also carry its share of poor rhymes. Our brains are also on point to find the anomaly, the new scene, the wrong note, or the unfamiliar.
it’s difficult to write away from the comfort zone. It’s dangerous and exposes vulnerabilities. that’s uncomfortable. An undetermined effort will eventually concede to the safer, easier write.
establishing rules for your writing is a good idea. It’s hard to tell sometimes what inspires a certain lyric. Sometimes words come out and bam, next line rhymes, and you like the melody, and before you know it, there’s verse one. But what have got there, where is it going? More than likely it’s the hook of the song. You’ve started with the hook, the refrain, maybe managed the whole chorus, so more than likely this is what you want the song to point out and now you have to build the verses to lead into the point you’re making. But hold on, I said I wasn’t going to write anymore being the victim lyrics, or you left me lyrics, or whatever. The rules were designed to help you change the trope. Look at what you have, can it be used to help you? If not, throw it away.
one rule that’s helped me is to not be afraid to start over. Delete the partial lyrics off my phone. See what comes next, a word, a connection, an observation. I’m continually looking for new hooks. The hook is the core of any lyric.