How To Write Like Taylor Swift
Today I have five tips from Taylor Swift's storytelling to help you become a better writer! From Midnights to her debut album, I have music themed writing advice for every Swiftie!
Transcript:
Hello, my name is Lily Meade. I am the author of The Shadow Sister, debuting Summer 2023 with Sourcebooks Fire, and today I am here because I finally figured out a way to make my obsession with Taylor Swift relate to my career as a writer.
Welcome to the first official episode of Pop Culture Storytelling, where I talk about my favorite things in media and how they’ve inspired me as a writer. I have a couple older videos similar to this, but I thought it would be cool to make an ongoing series solely dedicated to it. Maybe that way I can convince my accountant that Netflix is a business expense.
I’m joking about that, but I’m not joking about how you can learn to be a better writer by listening to Taylor Swift. Taylor, my meanest bestie, has kept me up past midnight every day for the past month and a half and while I have most certainly lost several brain cells because of it, it’s given me a lot of time to think.
Today I have five tips from Taylor’s songwriting to help you become a better writer.
Tip number one: Be vulnerable and honest.
Taylor is unapologetically and sometimes humiliatingly honest in her songwriting. She’s known for treating her lyrics like a diary and just as often as she exposes wrongdoers, she exposes herself. She cuts her insecurities wide open for public consumption not solely as a form of masochism, but a calculated risk of relatability.
There’s a reason her songs are loved by so many different types of people and she herself knows it isn’t simply the sound of them. Her fans love her for her lyricism and the way they know that no matter what genre she plays around in, they will find a story that they’ve lived themselves a thousand times before.
The best stories are the ones we are terrified to tell because of what they’ll reveal about us as the author. In my debut novel, my main character opens the book with “My sister is a bitch, but that doesn’t mean I want her dead.” I was worried the entire time I was writing the first draft that that line—and my main character herself—was too much and too flawed to be liked.
In a way, I feared the same of myself.
I am definitely not saying I’m anywhere near as skilled a writer as Taylor, but I approach writing in a similar way to her in that we both use our words to weave stories that help us process and heal through our pain and immortalize our joy. Like a diary, like self-therapy, like an exorcism—honestly.
My debut novel was the first project I trusted myself to take risks on since a traumatizing experience that made me fear my career was over before it even truly began, my own personal reputation era, if you will.
I totally expected to be asked to change the opening line of The Shadow Sister if a publisher wanted to buy it, but to my surprise my editor loved it. Early readers have all adored the first line and I’ve received several compliments on other things I was anxious about too, moments where I injected the fictional narrative with my own truths.
People like to embrace characters that don’t feel perfect and unattainable. They like flaws. They like to feel seen. This is something Taylor does exceedingly well.
Tip number two: Embrace the different facets of your creativity.
Recently Taylor explained that she internally categorizes her songs into three different groups: quill pen songs, fountain pen songs, and glitter gel pen songs.
Most of her songs fall into Fountain Pen territory, which she describes as “modern personal stories, written like poetry, about those moments you remember all too well where you can see, hear, and feel everything in screaming detail.”
Quill Pen songs feel older, set in a world where people wear corsets and poet shirts, and the word choices are equally as old fashioned and almost storybook.
Glitter Gel Pen songs are just as they sound, fun danceable songs that don’t take themselves too seriously.
Part of why Taylor is able to successfully reinvent herself and never get typecast into a single type of sound is because she doesn’t toss out her lighthearted moments to make an album of solely sad ballads, and in the same vein, she intersperses heart wrenching perspectives into beats that you can dance too.
No story is stronger for lingering solely on a single feeling. A full narrative, like a good album, is better when it takes you on a journey. It may help you to do an inventory of your own ideas or writing tendencies and use that to make sure you are balancing your emotional beats more effectively.
Tip number three: Twist the narrative and turn things on their head.
One of my favorite devices in Taylor’s storytelling is the progression of chorus perspective as a song moves forward. In “You’re On Your Own, Kid” from her new album Midnights, the narrator goes from a love sick teenager to an ambitious runaway to a jaded sell out through single line changes in the chorus leading into the bridge. This is a common tactic Taylor uses in her songs to re-contextualize her catchy hooks and unpack the layers of her metaphors.
Another trick Taylor loves is telling you the story about someone or something else and then at the end, sharing how it relates to her personally. In “the last great American dynasty” from Folklore, she shares the story of a woman judged by all her morally superior neighbors for not assimilating or respecting their made up rules and how despite all her rebellion, her house sat empty for decades after she died, freeing those high class snobs of “women with madness, their men and bad habits” until Taylor bought it for herself.
Both these tactics remind me of how it feels when a book ends on a twist or revelation that makes you want to flip back to the start and reread it in this entirely new context. I love stories and obviously songs like this. There’s something almost scandalous about it, even though it’s not hiding anything. It feels like you’re in on a secret, which makes you feel more attached to the story being told.
Tip number four: Embrace metaphor and what inspires you.
Sometimes when I’m listening to Taylor’s music I get almost angry at her lyricism, so mad not at her but myself for not thinking of these incredible lines first. This is usually when she takes a common metaphor or smilie and just slaps it into a brutal cut
The line “we never had a shotgun shot in the dark” from Getaway Car on reputation makes me feel like I’m in a gourmet restaurant eating the best meal I’ve ever had. My fingers are just like chef’s kiss so grateful but I’m also so upset that I can’t always eat like this.
Taylor has a talent for taking really relatable ideas and pairing or describing them in ways you don’t expect. It’s an extension of the last tip, her tendency to twist what you expect. It’s a fun way to explore writing prose.
When I’m writing,I like to think of the best way to use my metaphors to not only enhance the single line it lives in, but the scene as a whole. How can this comparison I’m making ricochet across the point I’m making? How can it deepen the emotions I want to invoke? How can it reveal things within my narrator that I’m not having them voice out loud?
Another way to do this is to return to your inspirations.
One of Taylor’s first big hits was “Love Story” from Fearless, a retelling of Romeo and Juliet that gives them the happy ending they were denied in the original. Taylor often makes references to literature, music, or figures that have inspired her—never in a way that feels dated, but a natural addition to her narrative.
“Peter losing Wendy” from cardigan on folklore, “when you think Tim Mcgraw” from her debut, the entirety of “Wonderland” from 1989, I really could keep going all day.
We’re often warned not to mention too many things from pop culture in our stories for worry of locking our stories to a specific timeframe that could be unrelatable to readers in the future, so you’ll want to be careful of the references you make, but it’s another tactic you could employ. Perhaps a bit more sparingly than the other tips.
And finally…
Tip number five: Don’t be afraid to burn it all down.
One of my favorite things about Taylor is her commitment to pettiness. I attend the school of thought that success is the best revenge and Taylor refuses to bow down. We as fans weren’t expecting a new album from her this year because she’s dedicated herself to rerecording her first six albums so she can own her work, but also as a message and warning to younger musicians to avoid predatory contracts like the one she signed when she started as a starry-eyed teenager.
She’d rather set fire to her past than be tied to puppet masters that don’t have her best interests at heart. I can’t explain, at least quickly in this video, how empowering that is to me.
But Taylor doesn’t just take risks in her life, she takes risks in her music with every new work. The world has always tried to typecast her to a certain type of artist, from her very first album.
When she decided to transition to pop after making her name in country, it wasn’t perceived as a slam dunk by everyone. Even in lyrics on RED Taylor says “who’s Taylor Swift anyway?” and talks about her ex listening to “some indie record that’s so much cooler than mine.”
But instead of listening to the naysayers, she doubled down with 1989 and created one of the most awarded and well received pop albums in history.
She never makes the same album twice, even if people are clamoring for it. She always values trying new techniques rather than get comfortable in a single sound. As someone who is also always trying to improve, I can tell you that is terrifying. I’m currently writing the second book in my contract and it’s very different from The Shadow Sister.
I’m scared every day that no one will like as much as they like my first, but I don’t want to write the same story forever. I’m always changing and growing.
Taylor knows we’ll follow her no matter where she goes, because we don’t love her for the notes she plays but the types of stories she tells. To develop a readership like that sounds like a dream. Hopefully one day I can achieve it too.
Tell me in a comment, does Taylor inspire your writing? How so?
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