I Bet You Think This Song is About You...

The Story in a Song: A Warm-up Writing Exercise

Ahoy, howdy and hello.

I’ve been busy putting together playlists for my brand new four-part writing workshop, The Story in a Song — starting on 2 June — and my Spotify taste profile is now extremely confused…

But I’m so excited about this one. In fact, I can’t actually wait another two weeks — which is why I’m posting up a quick little introductory exercise to give you a taste of what’s to come, and get your writing/musical brain all warmed up!

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This music-loving, creativity-inspiring series will invite you to immerse yourself in a range of playlists, learn from songwriting and composition techniques, and emerge with brand new ideas, characters, settings and stories.

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I bet you think this song is about you...

…that’s because it actually is. Or, at least, it reminds me of you.

We all have songs that have become inextricably connected to someone in our life — for good or for bad — right?

I have songs that remind me of loved ones and lost ones, of friends and bullies, of weddings and funerals, of people I’ve long since lost touch with but will forever be brought to mind whenever I hear the first few bars of a particular tune.

Like this one: Pretty by The Cranberries

I listened to this album on repeat one whole summer — the only cassette I took with me on a looooong road trip through Death Valley when my dad was working in the US.

(Yes, this was the time of Walkmans, and the 30-minute routine of having to flip the tape halfway through a song — an interruption so embedded in my subconscious that I still expect to hear the clunk of the play button popping up when I get to that part of the album.)

In the backseat with me was my sister, three years older and furious at the existence of pretty much everything — deep in a particularly tough time of adolescence. We’ve always been close, but at that point in our sisterhood we would flip-flop between slap-fights, hysterical laughter, vicious insults and temporary truces, all within the space of an hour.

But I could also see how fucking sad she was most of the time. I just didn’t know how to tell her that I knew she was struggling. And that I cared.

At some point, I gathered the courage to cue up this song on my Walkman, give her a nudge, and hand over my headphones.

She rolled her eyes but begrudgingly agreed to listen, scowling through a scant half a minute of the song before she lost patience.

“What about it?” she snapped.

“That’s you,” I insisted, but she’d already put her own headphones back on, and I have no idea* whether she’d really heard the lyrics I was trying to speak through:

You're so pretty the way you are.
You’re so pretty the way you are.
And you have no reason to be so insolent to me.
You’re so pretty the way you are.

Look, sometimes music just delivers in a way that regular words can’t. Especially if you’re an awkward twelve-year-old who has no idea how to comfort a depressed teenager.

Anyhow, thirtyish years later, Pretty still makes me think of her. Actually, it makes me want to cry at how much I love my brilliant, clever, hilarious, beautiful sister, and how I wish we could go back in time and comfort our suffering teenage selves. Or if there’s anything anyone could have said to actually help in that moment.

It’s so much more than ‘just’ a pretty little song.

It’s a tether to a moment, a feeling, a connection, a blooming awareness, and a mirror turned back on myself.

(*I realised while writing that I’ve never asked if she remembers this. Though I suspect she’ll just laugh and tell me I’m a sentimental lil’ bitch, which is accurate. But maybe that’s another interesting factor in how intensely personal a song can be for one person and mean something entirely different to the next.)

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Your turn:

Are you already thinking of a song that reminds you of someone?

Go ahead: take a moment and make a nostalgic playlist of songs that connect you to a specific someone in your life — past or present.

Perhaps you can trace it back to a singular moment. Perhaps you’re not even sure why that song makes you think of them. The reasons don’t really matter. Just make a note of the songs, give them a listen, and immerse yourself in the memory for a minute (or three)…

(Oh, and please share them in the comments! I love a collaborative mixtape.)

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Okay, how does any of this relate to writing?

Well. I dunno about you, but these songs churn up a lot of emotion for me, along with a tangible sense of time, place, self, and connection.

It’s a bit like how olfactory memories are meant to be the most powerful, because the sensory aspect bypasses the intellectualising, rationalising, hindsight-rearranging part of your brain. It just takes you straight to the moment.

I think music can do that too. It sweeps us up into the emotion — it can make us cry, laugh, feel empowered, want to rage out, celebrate, or pensively remember something meaningful.

And when we really tap into that depth of feeling, we can practise building off these very real, very vivid, very layered memories to bring a little extra authenticity into our writing.

Important note: This doesn’t, of course, mean you have to write about the actual person or an actual moment¹. This is just my approach to Writing What You Know. Starting from something honest, actually feeling your feelings, and finding a way to translate that into your writing with as much realism and insight as possible.

For example, from my Pretty-sister connection, I could write about:

• A pair of squabbling sisters

• A twelve-year-old out of her emotional depth

• An unhappy teenager struggling with her sense of identity

• A long, dreamlike desert road trip

• A character trying their best to reach out to someone they love, but unable to find the right words

• A character looking back at their difficult adolescent years with a little more wisdom and understanding

Even if none of the details I write about have any relation to reality, my experience of that moment, and the feelings brought up by the music means I’ll be starting from a place of truth.

So pick one of your songs and write some notes about:

• The emotions it brings up: joy, sadness, whimsy, frustration, freedom, anger, catharsis?

• The person it reminds you of: your relationship with them; how thinking about them makes you feel.

• The scenario, time or place: the circumstances the song belongs in.

• The lyrics that hold meaning for you: or the mood of the music, or perhaps some other seemingly disconnected association that floats to the surface as you start to sift through these thoughts…

Then disconnect all those fragments and puzzle pieces and pick out the ones that spark something new: an idea for a character, a situation, a conversation, a moment of discovery or change?

Let your ideas expand and mutate and develop. Perhaps you’ll touch upon a moment to incorporate into your work-in-progress. Perhaps you’ll come up with a brand new idea for a story or poem. Perhaps you’ll integrate some of these emotional responses into a protagonist.

Change the details by a few degrees. Change the setting or the era or rewrite the ending. Transpose those very real thoughts and feelings and experiences into something entirely fictional and thread a live wire of realism through your writing.

Then join me in June for a whole month of story-inspiring playlists, exercises, and writing theory with The Story in a Song. :)

Hope to write along with you soon :)

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1. Although if you do end up writing about the actual, literal, real life moment, consider sending it to Stereo Stories — a lit mag that specialises in ‘evocative, concise memoirs based around a song’.