PART SEVEN
Plot Strategies: The Romantic Relationship

Parts III through VI covered ways to generate plots, cap them with memorable titles, enliven them with wordplay, and outline them in the ideal frame. This section addresses songdom's favorite subject–the various stages of that four-letter word–without which there would be no Top 40: Love–sought, found, lost, strayed, stolen, regretted, revived, regained. You might think that the subject of love needs no prewriting suggestions or small craft warnings. But ironically, the road to love lyrics is perilous–fraught with unseen potholes and hairpin curves–to say nothing of stalled motors. If we consider that love songs are often written in the heat of longing or passion or pain, it's easy to understand why they may need to be rewritten in the cool of logic and clarity and reason. Of course we're talking about the limbic brain versus the cerebral cortex.

So, yes, there'll be some guidelines and caveats to help prevent detours and to keep your creative motor purring. So ready or not, here comes love, or to be precise, its three-letter relation, Sex.