Lyrics AIN'T HERE!!!

Ah, the old muse leave you?  Always rough, since when she is with you everything seems emotionally charged and full of "message."  On the other hand, there is plain ole simple technique, the craft of writing, which you should work on w/o inspiration.  Allen Ginsberg once gave our class a rebus, which is a French kid's pictogram of words making a sentance.  Sorta like a crossword puzzle made of pictures.  Of course, the picture words didn't meant nothing in English, and was  a perfect exercise to force one's mind to come up w/ something. 

Work from images, unrelated, and come up w/ a story behind them, is a good substitute.  Take a walk and find visuals, open a magazine (or book for words) and close your eyes and point to place, and things like that can work your poetic muscles even if you don't have something important to say.  Work hard enough on basically unrelated images, words or ideas will "make" a conceptual framework.  Many times it will make a better poem since it can make it easier to avoid cliches.

When they were shooting "Marathon Man" Dustin Hoffman stayed up all night before they were to shoot the dentist scene.  He came in all ragged and Laurence Olivier supposedly said, "Why don't you try acting, my dear boy?"

@

I can definitely say I also have lots of trouble doing those things like adding references to my lyrics. Like, I really hate wen what I write is just straight, exactly as it sounds or what-you-see-is-what-you-get kinda deal. But when I TRY to add allusions, they suck.

I wrote this one song called 'Reply' (some may've heard it) that a LOT of people seem to like. That's the ONLY song that isn't 100% word-for-word, being that the whole song is about references to various social media. Additionally, the song came easily- I wrote and recorded the bulk of it in about a day, no problems. Additionally, it was a really simple song.

When it comes to taking random things and comparing them in unlike (or even similar) ways, I just CAN'T DO IT! WHen I write songs that aren't ABOUT anything in particular, they end up being NOTHING at all! I recorded this song called 'Butterflies', and in the end, lyrically, the song meant literally nothing- it has a massive heap of unrecognizably unrelated lyrics that just happened to rhyme.

I don't know if the key is to replicate my upsides, or to try something different every time? I for sure do need to give a schedule a try.

Thanks, SC. Another thing that comes to mind is that sometimes I force myself, where FORCIBLY writing the lyrics just isn't fun for me. 

I additionally for myself has seen that just writing STUFF in a flowing form gets the ideas and framework hammered out well.
Today, my friend actually gave me an idea that I'd tack onto something I had sitting for a while. My writing process (so far) has consisted of writing words that makes sense in an overall scheme, completely neglecting rhyming and tempo for the moment, as those thing can be fixed later on.

Seems to work pretty well so far! 

Ha, that's for sure. Although now I can say i haven't had any experiences to write about xD

But SHE'S HERE! I've got two hits in the works as we speak. I'll def have to try the song-a-day method, in any case.