Where to Start Writing

Written by Brent Tallent

Back when I was writing more often, people would ask a lot if I started with the lyrics, the melody or what. Writing has changed a lot recently with loops and hip hop’s influence. I’m going to use language in this article that may seem a little old school, but I’m sure that the analogy still applies no matter what forms your creative process is utilizing.

In music there are seven main components: melody, bass line, harmony, counter melody, lyrics (if it’s not instrumental), rhythm and counter rhythm. In rap the melody is spoken and relies more on rhythm than pitch although pitch is there and shouldn’t be forgotten. Counter melody might be a background vocal or a repeating guitar line. All genres of music have these elements in some form.

So which should you start with? I went through a couple phases where I would suggest one over the other, but after a million years of writing my answer became… all of them. You should experiment using each of them as starting points. If you start off working on a bass line and really refine it before moving on, it will have an influence on how your melody evolves. If you start with the rhythm and shape a really great groove before anything else, it will lead your bass line and melody. Experiment with all of them as starting points – even counter melody as difficult as that may sound.

The problem with always starting with the lyrics or the melody, (or any same element), is that you will generally get locked into a small creative space and eventually everything will sound similar. However, if you utitlize different starting points, you usually find that your creative pallete increases as you go through the cycle several times.

I often ask rappers about their workflow and have found that, so far, they are all following the same routine. The routine is: have a producer create a groove; take it home and create the lyric; bring it back and record it. I really think there could be a lot of innovation found by changing the routine. Start with the lyric. Or start with a bass line only so that the vocal has opportunity to lead the rhythm and then create a complimenting rhythm track.

You can apply this same overall idea to the shaping of the lyric. How many ways could you start a lyric? If you listen to young writers, you’ll usually hear that they get very stuck in a form. Once I studied an album by going line by line and notating how every line started. Whether it was a verb, noun preposition… Whether it was 1 st, 2 nd or 3 rd person… Going through the process opened up my mind to all sorts of new ideas and helped me to create ideas that weren’t in that particular album

So if you’re up for it, next time you sit down to write, start in a different place and see what you come up with.