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.


This is THE book for lyric writing   April 17, 2002
Kevin S. Currie (Richmond, VA)
28 out of 29 found this review helpful

Lyric writing is doubtless the hardest aspect of songwriting (for most of us anyhow.) Believe me though when I say that this book is better than any other for helping you clear this most challenging hurdle.

I took two lyric writing courses with Pat at Berklee Coll. of Music and although I don't recall that this book was required, I bought it anyway. Pat is just too insightful not to have his ideas and suggestions spined out on my bookshelf.

First, he covers a technique called object writing. Without giving away too much, it is a brainstorming technique which shows us how to dig deeper into ours senses. This not only helps us write more powerful lyrics, but strengthens our imagination, insuring that fresh ideas abound. It is no exageration to say that this alone is worth the book's price many times over.

From here, he goes into methods of charting a lyric. Most of us tend not to think this systematically when writing (mapping out different rhyme-schemes and metaphor possibilities) but often times, it can help our writing develop an often lacking structure.

While these first chapters are arguably the meat of the book, the rest will prove valuable as well, going into metaphor, viewpoint, meter and the like. With grace and insight, Pat shows us continuously how to 'show, not tell' the listener your story, a lesson that many writers unfortunaltely never learn.

No matter what tools are missing from your lyric writing toolbox, Pat can help you find, polish and utilize them. Enjoy!!


Top Notch   January 21, 2002
BooksByCategory.com (World Wide Web)
18 out of 19 found this review helpful

Even looking at the pages of the book that are posted here doesn't give you any idea of how wonderful this book is.

Pat doesn't spend a lot of time on teaching you how to "brainstorm" (3 of 19 chapters) but what he does of it is solid suggestions that you can follow step by step.

Then he gets into the nuts and bolts of writing, using made-up and real songs and a combination of both, to show you step by step (and verse by verse) how to build (and not to build) a song.

Nowhere along the way does he assume you know the basics, nor does he talk down to you to explain them.

He clearly explains how each verse should build on the previous vers, where the "power points" of a song are, and how to make more of them.

Then he shows you how point of view of a song can make it great or terrible and when to break the general "rules".

Even when he gets into meter (which as a non-songwriter I've always thought of in terms of poems) he explains how because of the nursery songs we grew up with we expect certain things and when to put them into a song and when not to.

Then he puts all this together as a teaching tool.

As if this wasn't enough, he shows how he built a song through 10 revisions and why those were the revisions he chose.

I'm getting his other two books!!


Excellent discussion and demostration of writing process   August 28, 1998
timm.mclagan@celwave.com (Corvallis, OR)
15 out of 16 found this review helpful

Pat Pattison's book, WRITING BETTER LYRICS, was a great foundational tool for me as amateur song writer. It focussed on the writing process by leading me through various professional song examples--from rough draft to polished form-- while providing exercises to focus my own writing. Great book for the aspiring amateur and fresh inspiration for the experienced veteran.


This book is great   December 7, 2001
11 out of 12 found this review helpful

I bought this book and "The Craft of Lyric Writing" by Sheila Davis based on the recommendations of reviewers in Amazon. If you are looking for one book to help you write better lyrics (or poetry or journal entries or anything), I would say "Writing Better Lyrics" is the one you want. Each chapter has exercises to help you tap into seeing more, thinking more, imagining more, and getting more into your lyric and your story. You can get inspiration from the examples in each chapter and then do the exercise yourself. Or, as I have done, just use the idea and make your own exercises.
"The Craft of Lyric Writing" is a basic book. I found it helpful in analyzing the structure of songs, but did not get as inspired as I have from "Writing Better Lyrics."