How does your everyday life influence your writing?

[Dingoist]

How does my everyday life influence my writing? None. It's the every day little deaths that influence my writing.

[waterbed]

i'll generally write about my own experiences, but i'll change things around or obscure facts or focus, and often end up with a completely different story that's only obliquely related, but that works better as a song.
news and issues work their way into a lot of my songs, sometimes as background, sometime as the main point.
i've written a couple songs that were meant to be pure fiction, but then i realize that they come from my life and i just wasn't thinking about them.

in other words, if you asked the other people in the songs if that's what happened, they might get angry and call me a liar or say that's not what happened, but they wouldn't think i was just making up random shit. will smith doesn't save the world from aliens or zombies in my songs, basically.

[ColinLynch]

lyrics should be stories.

personally i feel if your stories are fictional then the song is artificial. the best lyrics out there are from people who have a solid grasp of what they are talking about.

I use life experiences in my lyrics, then put a poetic twist on them so the audience has to guess what I'm talking about... making it easier to have a song relate to someone with a different meaning.

its a mental game.

[MarvinDog]

Originally Posted by ColinLynch

personally i feel if your stories are fictional then the song is artificial. the best lyrics out there are from people who have a solid grasp of what they are talking about.

Springsteen? Townshend?

Compare McCartney's Story lyrics (For No One, Eleanore Rigby) to his Diarist lyrics (Silly Love Songs).

[Lee Knight]

Originally Posted by ColinLynch

lyrics should be stories.

personally i feel if your stories are fictional then the song is artificial. the best lyrics out there are from people who have a solid grasp of what they are talking about.

To each his own. And I do mean that...

But there's nothing wrong with "artificial". "Ziggy played guitar!" Some of the most influential words ever written were made up stories. Of Mice and Men. Catcher in the Rye.

These things really didn't happen. They were the constructs of a creative mind. Yes, using real life experience to inform the big lie he's telling. The big lie that gets to the real truth.

That's fiction. Nothin' wrong with fiction.

As a side note, there's a Commander Cody live album where the singer (not Cody) finishes a tear jerker of a country song and tenderly yet joking says, "That's all right folks. That story didn't really happen. I just made it up one night... it's OK."

[easilyspooked]

Originally Posted by ColinLynch

personally i feel if your stories are fictional then the song is artificial

that shakespeare guy was such a poser.
all science fiction? worthless.

actually i'm assuming you didn't mean that statement to be as strong as i read it, by Fiction you mean Lies or Experiences To Which You Are Not Empathetic, which is sortof obvious, if you Can't Empathize with a given Character you are trying to use as a Narrator, of course the Art will come out Artificial, because you will have placed your own emotional needs onto a character that doesn't experience the world the way you do.

to place Emotion into a Character that engages a Fictional Narrative is to try to place ourselves as writers into the greater context of human existence, to reach out to our fellow man and beg for understanding.