10 Step Songwriting Process by Andrea Stolpe

This is a great article on a cool songwriting technique.
THE 10-STEP PROCESS TO SONGWRITING
FROM COMMERCIAL SONGWRITING TECHNIQUES
BY ANDREA STOLPE
Andrea Stolpe has collaborated with great artists such as Mike Reid, Don Schlitz, and Stephen Robson, and penned songs for pop and country artists including Faith Hill, Steve Azar, Josh Gracin, Shonagh Daly and Daniel Lee Martin.

We songwriters are constantly looking for great song material. We’re also looking to express our ideas with an artistic voice that is as unique as we are. Furthermore, most us want to simplify the process and expand our marketability. One important key to marketability in the hit song market is, of course, content.
Effective songs paint rich images for the listener. Imagine that your songs are paintings. Are you the proud creator of stick figures scrawled across construction paper, or does your palette of texture, color, and light capture the desires and deepest wan- derings of those gazing upon it?

To ensure that the latter is the case, you can use a writing process called destination writing. In destination writing, we begin with one key word—a place—as the momentum for your song content. The key to destination writing is to use all of your senses—touch, taste, smell, sight, sound, and also movement—as springboards for creativity. When those senses are involved, the writing springs to life.

SIX KEYS OF CONNECTION:
1. touch
2. taste
3. sight
4. smell
5. sound 
6. movement

The connection that your audience makes with your lyrics depends on the power of this one key word. But how do we build that connection with the audience? By illustrating our piece through specifics and actions. We immediately know the meanings of words like ‘walk’ and ‘say’. But these words are generic and will not engage any audience by themselves. But there are dynamic alternatives. Consider the sentence below.

And I was saying
We know what’s being said, but it doesn’t mean anything.
And I was stuttering And I was stammering And I was blurting out
All of these phrases swapped out the boring ‘say’ with verbs that are emotionally charged. Verbs and adjectives like these that will keep your audience’s attention.

Once you’ve got a handle on what words will draw your audience, it is time to craft a compelling narrative. Any destination writing will consist of two types of detail: external and internal. Assume that your song is centered on a primary character. The external details will be what happens around your character and the internal details will be their thoughts and feelings. Any good song will be a mix of both. Toggling, or the art of combining internal and external detail, is integral to providing balance in your lyrics. Too much internal detail and your song from will be weighed down by the thoughts of the characters. Too much external and the audience will have nothing personal to identify with.

So how are our words going to work with the music? How we expect the melody to move is going to influence how the lyrics move as well. Every new melodic idea presented in a song – a movement from the verse to the pre-chorus, for example – will go hand in hand with a new lyrical idea. I’m sure you’re familiar with “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

Mary had a little lamb
Whose fleece was white as snow Everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go

These fours lines contain two musical and two lyrical phrases (“Mary had... white as snow” and “Everywhere...lamb was sure to go.”). But this isn’t the only way to attack these four lines. We could have kept describing the various attributes of Mary’s little lamb over all four lines. In that case, we would continue the same melodic idea for the entire verse. We could also change ideas with each new line if we have a new melodic idea to accompany these ideas.
The melodic phrasing determines not only where the topics begin and end but also where a rhyme might occur. For ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,” the rhyme was occurring between the two large musical phrases.

Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow A
And Everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go A

If the four lines were all representing four smaller melodic phrases, the rhyme scheme might look more like this. Note that wherever the melodic phrase closes, rhyme occurs.

Mary had a little lamb A
and Mary had a pony too B
the sun was rising on the land A 
and May was slipping into June B

Once you have your primary lyrical sections in place and developed, it is time to contrast. Imagine if every section of a song had the same number of lines, the same rhyme scheme, the same rhythm and the same toggling pattern. Sounds boring. By changing up the rhyme scheme, changing the rhythm, adding or subtracting lines, and altering the toggling pattern, a songwriter can keep things interesting over the course of their work.

Just from these short exercises, it’s clear to see that the process of commercial songwriting is based on a number of patterns. These patterns make up the content of hit songs and these are patterns that a songwriter can reproduce while still maintaining a unique voice. Knowing these patterns is critical to the success of both beginners and experienced writers. With this in mind, the best way I’ve found to approach commercial songwriting is through something I call “The 10-Step Process.”

THE 10-STEP PROCESS.
Step 1: Destination-write. 
Step 2: Find rhyme pairs.

Step 3: Choose a rhyme scheme and toggling pattern.
Step 4: Add prepositions and conjunctions.
Step 5: Choose a plot progression.
Step 6: Destination-write again using thought/feeling language.
Step 7: Look for titles and write the chorus.
Step 8: Write a second verse and pre-chorus.
Step 9: Write the bridge.
Step 10: Assess verbs, tense, and point of view, and conversational quality.

By utilizing all of these steps, you’ll be able to craft commercially viable songs with ease. You’ll notice that I didn’t go over every step in the process. It wouldn’t make much sense, commercially speaking, for me to share everything I know here, would it?