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.

38 of 39 found the following review helpful:


This is THE book for lyric writing  Apr 17, 2002 By Kevin S. Currie
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!!

37 of 41 found the following review helpful:


Good technical information not so good group requirements...  Jan 23, 2004
I have been writing songs for the better part of my 32 year old life. I've even sold some and made some money. I can say though that it's never too late to improve a good thing.

For someone who is looking to strengthen their potential, learn how to formulate verse from a single idea and even generate ideas, this is a great book.

The one thing I have to mention is the "group" requirement. Many if not most of the more beneficial exercises ask you to gather in a group of four persons or more. When we talk about brainstorming, most of us understand the benefits of doing it with a group; it is simply most effective with a group of people participating. However, those of us who carry notebooks in our pockets, take our laptops everywhere we go, keep a voice recorder in our pocketbook and go into seclusion for days on end to capture ideas and think through a song know - writing is done alone. I just don't have anyone I can call on to sit in a room and think of metaphors with. In fact, why would I want to?

Other than that, this book does have a lot of good stuff inside. It's worth a read and the exercises have helped me immensely.

21 of 22 found the following review helpful:


Top Notch  Jan 21, 2002 By BooksByCategory.com
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!!

11 of 11 found the following review helpful:


Had to buy this book!  Jan 14, 2006 By Linda M. Piechowski
I checked this book out from my public library and after reading

it, I needed to buy it for further use. I suggest that people who get this book, read it as if a fiction book the first time through...just to get a total overview of the direction Pattison is taking with his teaching. Then, read it a second time, doing the exercises, and studying and practicing the material. The book develops upon development until it summarizes the whole lyric writing process in the final pages of the book. Pattison, a professional writer, lets the reader "watch" how he himself creates a real lyric from start to finish in the final chapter of this book. But in order to understand what he is doing, a reader must have read all the prior chapters.

The only criticism that I have is that I felt as if I was being

programmed into only one style of lyric writing--a country western ballad-type, the kind that would tell a short story just so that the repeated refrain could be looked at with new eyes and not be boring. I think though that is because I'm new at proper lyric writing and haven't studied much before this book. A person who buys this book will probably need to read other material and authors as well, so as not to get into a same-old, same-old rut. But what the heck...a person has to start learning somewhere...and this is a great book to start with.

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