PART SIX
More Design Strategies: The Framing Device

Often lyricists just begin to write without doing much in the way of advance planning. The impetus may be a strong emotion, or a new title, or an overheard remark that stirs the imagination. They may plunge right into the writing/shaping mode without going through the associating/incubating modes that might have yielded a far richer treatment of the idea.

The next strategies offer a group of literary techniques that can give your lyric more style. I call them framing devices: Just as the ideal frame sets off a painting, so, too, does the ideal frame set off a lyric. Coming up are six types of frames to consider for your future song concepts: The Question Plot, The Phone Call, The Letter, The Setting, The Third-Person Vignette, and the Conversational Debate.