How to write lyrics that aren't shit

So I've been writing lyrics for the theatre for nearly 18 years now, and everyday I am still learning. Like all the best forms of artistic expression, mastery is the work of a lifetime. So I hope I've still got a long way to go, but more and more folks are getting in touch asking for advice on lyric writing so I thought I'd see if I can't distill what I've learned in to something easily digestible... so here goes:

1. Write a Characters True Experience

To write a characters true experience of their world/situation we must be fully aware of their environment. While writing a lyric we should be able to figure out the answers to the following questions:

What time is it?
What season is it?
Where are they?
What's the weather like?
When did they last eat?
Are they under the influence of alcohol/drugs?
What has just happened?
What can they see, smell, taste, touch and hear?
What is their emotional state?

Why are these questions important? Well they provide an authentic way in to the characters world.

​So rather than saying "I'm so angry at the world" you can then imagine what a person who is angry at the world would focus on in their environment. And that is what will give you that characters unique take on their experience. A song set late at night in winter is going to sound vastly different to a song set mid morning in spring. A person who is angry one morning in spring might for example see a blooming flower and be immediately filled with envy or jealousy or even rage at the simplicity of the flower's existence. A person who is angry one night in winter might see a fire burning in the hearth and identify directly with it's flames and the way it eats everything in it's path. The emotion might be the same but the way in which we identify with it can be vastly different and, when influenced by our environment becomes an authentic and unique (yet universal) expression of that feeling. 

And, as in life, one of the greatest challenges we face as humans is the difficulty of identifying the emotions we are feeling in the moment that we are feeling them. Using external markers and our senses help us as humans to identify what we are feeling, and so our characters should do the same.

Once you have established that environmental influence of course there is then scope to go deeper into the characters internal mind, but it is often the first minute of a lyric that will tell an audience whether this lyricist knows what they're doing and will give themselves over to more emotional exploration.

2. True Rhyme is not your enemy, your enemy is scansion and line length.

A rhyme that says:
I love you with all of my heart
I hope we will never part

Is an incredibly lazy lyric. But it's not the rhyme itself that is lazy, it is the way in which it is utilised:
I love you with all of my heart
But there may come a day when the seasons of life will break us and pull us apart

This lyric remains simplistic, but infinitely improved by the increased and unexpected length of time between the two simple rhymes. So focus not on the words themselves, but rather the length of the lines between the words.

3. Turn your editor off

There are two people living inside every lyricists head. The creator and the editor. Both have their place, but should not encroach on each others time or space. And should never operate together. The creator will create some inevitable crap and it's the editors job to remove the dirt and leave the gold. But if the editor is turned on too soon, the creator will never get to dig down to the gold. Each hole that is begun, if gold is not immediately apparent the editor will tell the creator to move on to a different hole. That's not how mining works and it's not how lyrics work.  You have to dig through the crap to get to the gold. Once you've got to the gold, it's then the editors job to polish it and clean off the dirt. It's not their job to tell you to stop before you've even reached the gold. So make sure you dig down through the dirt. Give yourself a frickin' break.

I'll leave it there for now. But there'll me more I'm sure.

Darren